Ecological Evaluation of Persuasive Messages Using Google AdWords

In recent years there has been a growing interest in crowdsourcing methodologies to be used in experimental research for NLP tasks. In particular, evaluation of systems and theories about persuasion is difficult to accommodate within existing frameworks. In this paper we present a new cheap and fast methodology that allows fast experiment building and evaluation with fully-automated analysis at a low cost. The central idea is exploiting existing commercial tools for advertising on the web, such as Google AdWords, to measure message impact in an ecological setting. The paper includes a description of the approach, tips for how to use AdWords for scientific research, and results of pilot experiments on the impact of affective text variations which confirm the effectiveness of the approach.Comment: To appear at ACL 2012. 9 pages, 2 figure

To Sing like a Mockingbird.

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Paths of most resistance: navigating the culture industry in William Faulkner, Richard Wright, Delmore Schwartz, and Eudora Welty

This dissertation explores how four modernist writers of the 1930s and 1940s—William Faulkner, Richard Wright, Delmore Schwartz, and Eudora Welty—used their works to present ways to resist and navigate what they present as the frequently reductive worldview offered by the culture industry. Faulkner tends to show the culture industry as selling easy answers that focus on the end result, which allows his characters to approach the culture industry with a sense of fatalism. To resist this, Faulkner stresses a step-by-step, complex dialectical understanding of the culture industry, one that shows the fissures in its seemingly straightforward narratives and allows the reader to see how the narratives of the culture industry are not totalizing and can be resisted. Richard Wright, with his Native Son (1940), has written a better piece of mass culture, one that both gives the reader what he wants and helps show how the pleasures of mass culture are tied to a racist system. More than any of the other writers I’m discussing, Wright courts a wide audience by expertly using the tropes of various popular forms of the late 1930s—movies, crime novels, gothic fiction, newspapers, protest novels—and then adds an extra layer of analysis that explores how these pieces of mass culture are not ideologically neutral. One of the protagonists in a Delmore Schwartz story compares a movie to the Oracle at Delphi, which gave prophesies enigmatic enough to allow differing interpretations. The masses in Schwartz’s stories approach mass culture looking for simple entertainment, and that’s what they get. The conflicted artist figures who are the protagonists of Schwartz’s stories approach mass culture more complexly, and Schwartz shows how an artistically inclined mind can find much of value in mass culture if he knows what to look for. Eudora Welty, finally, shows mass culture as something that can help compound a sense of (frequently female) alienation. For Welty, it is small moments of emotional connection that allow people to find a way out of the totalizing system of mass culture

Gulshan Muraqqa’: An Imperial Discretion

Title from PDF of title page, viewed on June 13, 2016Thesis advisor: Burton DunbarVitaIncludes bibliographical references (pages 77-81)Thesis (M.A.)--Department of Art and Art History. University of Missouri--Kansas City, 2016Title from PDF of title page, viewed on June 13, 2016Thesis advisor: Burton DunbarVitaIncludes bibliographical references (pages 77-81)Thesis (M.A.)--Department of Art and Art History. University of Missouri--Kansas City, 2016This thesis researches two folios (pages) from the Gulshan muraqqa’, an imperial album of the Mughal Empire. The two folios, The Poet and the Prince and A Buffalo Hunting a Lioness, are currently in the permanent collection of The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri. Visual descriptions, focusing on style and subject matter, bring to light suppositions regarding artist attributions and a strong sufi connection thus far relatively unexplored and unrealized in relation to these paintings. Technical analyses of the folios are presented and analyzed within context. This investigation demonstrates the amalgamated presence of Indian, Persian, and European influences in these two folios as representative of the Gulshan muraqqa’. Calligraphy panels of the folios and border decorations contribute additional understanding of the sufi underpinning.College of Arts and SciencesIntroduction -- Visual description: the poet and the prince -- Visual description: a buffalo hunting and lioness -- Visual and technical analyses of the two folios -- Conclusionmonographi

Progress in Direct Measurements of the Hubble Constant

One of the most exciting and pressing issues in cosmology today is the discrepancy between some measurements of the local Hubble constant and other values of the expansion rate inferred from the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation. Resolving these differences holds the potential for the discovery of new physics beyond the standard model of cosmology: Lambda Cold Dark Matter (LCDM), a successful model that has been in place for more than 20 years. Given both the fundamental significance of this outstanding discrepancy, and the many-decades-long effort to increase the accuracy of the extragalactic distance scale, it is critical to demonstrate that the local measurements are convincingly free from residual systematic errors. We review the progress over the past quarter century in measurements of the local value of the Hubble constant, and discuss remaining challenges. Particularly exciting are new data from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). JWST is delivering high-resolution near-infrared imaging data to both test for and to address directly several of the systematic uncertainties that have historically limited the accuracy of the extragalactic distance scale. We present an overview of our new JWST program to observe Cepheids, TRGB and JAGB stars. For the first galaxy in our program, NGC 7250, the high-resolution JWST images demonstrate that many of the Cepheids observed with the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) are significantly crowded by nearby neighbors. Avoiding the more significantly crowded variables, the scatter in the JWST near-infrared (NIR) Cepheid period-luminosity relation is decreased by a factor of two compared to those from HST, illustrating the power of JWST for improvements to local measurements of Ho. Ultimately, these data will either confirm the standard model, or provide robust evidence for the inclusion of additional new physics.Comment: Invited Review for JCAP 20th special issue, 46 pages, 16 figures, 1 table; V2 updated with minor grammatical corrections and replacement of one figure with accompanying tex

NATIVES AND NEWCOMERS, MARRIAGE AND BELONGING - South Asian social networks of immigration, work and settlement in the Sheffield area during the early twentieth century

Apart from the port riots of 1919-20, historians have generally ascribed little significance to the presence of non-white immigrants in Britain before 1948. However, this thesis contends that the settlement ‘bridgeheads’ established by South Asian pioneers played a key role in aiding mass immigration to Britain after 1948, in the post-Partition, post-British Nationality Act, post-Windrush era. These bridgeheads were formed by alliances between white working-class natives and South Asians, mostly former seafarers, but including dedicated pedlars, through social networks of marriage and friendship, as workmates and neighbours. They formed nodes on a growing trans-imperial network which facilitated the further migration of Indian kin and countrymen. Marriages took place across Britain, particularly in ports, but also inland, and a settlement of natives and newcomers, previously un-researched, developed in the Sheffield area after the First World War. Many of these men from British India (now Pakistan and Indian Punjab), married working-class women native to the city and raised families together. The men’s original intention was a sojourning, economic migration, but their unions with white natives appear to have modified their adherence to a ‘myth of return’ to their family farms in colonial India. Indeed, they opted instead to remain in Britain with their new families. Examining the nature of the immigrants’ social networks, and using the experience of the Sheffield area as its focus, this thesis also examines the processes of cultural exchange and co-operation between (mainly white) natives and immigrant newcomers. Rather than adhere to a conflict-based historiography, this detailed analysis of early British immigration history situates the role of co-operative and ethnically-mixed social networks centrally in the non-white settlement of Britain. By doing so, the thesis aims to provide a nuanced assessment of the extent to which contemporary ideologies of Empire and race were internalised by natives, particularly within the working-class communities to which the South Asian newcomers belonged

The real issue is flying, not death. Dealing with risk in the subculture of Italian gliding

This thesis aims to rethink subcultural theory by applying it to an unusual age bracket. It proposes to chart forms of reflexivity in risk perception among the practitioners of a dangerous sport, and adopts as its empirical point of departure the subculture of middle class, middle-aged glider pilots in the Italian village of Bilonia. Exploring the world of gliding, it describes ethnographically the local situations in two gliding clubs, Bilonia, where the main fieldwork took place, and Piti, where a second shorter period of participant-observation was conducted. Adopting a comparative perspective, these local realities are contrasted amongst themselves and with the wider subculture of gliding in Italy. The thesis argues that, despite the prevalence of a single dominant subculture, gliding is practised in different ways in different places, especially with regard to risk perception and management. However, these are affected in all locations by the peculiar characteristic of the subculture, the average age of the glider pilots, which rules out the extreme behaviours of younger practitioners and goes against the tenets of some explanations of voluntary risk taking. In the first three chapters a theoretical framework is developed based upon advances in sports anthropology, subcultural theory and social scientific theories of risk. In the empirical chapters that follow, gliding is variously introduced as an experience involving a precise script, as a local reality tinged with peculiarities that set it apart from the wider reality of the sport in the national arena. The last three chapters discuss key points of the theoretical approach adopted and the findings they led to, in particular the implications for the study of sport subcultures. The empirical data presented suggest the existence of a middle-aged sport subculture, something that has not often been encountered in the literature on the subject. It is shown how risk perception follows a precise pattern which is shaped by the cultural norm of the gliding subculture – in its turn affected by the average age of the members

Incivility in Mass Political Discourse: The Causes and Consequences of an Uncivil Public

In this dissertation project, I explore the effect that exposure to uncivil political talk has on deliberative attitudes and behavior. I hypothesize that incivility in political discourse can induce anti-deliberative attitudes among the public, and increases the use of incivility in political talk. I argue that an anti-deliberative spirit among the public helps fuel mass partisan polarization, and limits the positive effects that come from public deliberation. Using survey data, I find that use of incivility by the public when talking politics has increased. This trend has come alongside changes in partisan polarization and media over the last few decades. A separate analysis confirms the tie between exposure to partisan, uncivil media and uncivil political talk; using panel data, I find that exposure to political talk radio and pundit-based television programming leads audience members with like-minded political views to mimic uncivil language and tactics when expressing their own political opinions. I use experimental methods to explore incivility's effects more in-depth. Drawing from affective intelligence theory, I hypothesize that political incivility has the ability to induce anger, which in turn reduces deliberative attitudes. In one experiment, I manipulate the amount of incivility in an online message board. I find that uncivil political talk induced feelings of anger in individuals when one's partisan in-group was targeted, and led to an increased use of incivility when the partisan out-group was targeted. When feelings of anger are stimulated in people, they reprimand the uncivil "perpetrator" on the message board, and display anti-deliberative attitudes--including a reduced propensity to consider alternative views and lower levels of satisfaction with interactive online communication. A second experiment, embedded in a national survey, confirms that disagreeable incivility and like-minded incivility have different effects. Uncivil messages that are disagreeable induce feelings of anger, decrease willingness to compromise, and boost use of incivility. While the connection between like-minded incivility, anger, and anti-deliberative attitudes is less clear, uncivil messages lead like-minded messages to mimic uncivil and anti-deliberative behavior. My findings show that incivility limits political deliberation. I conclude by noting the consequences of this, as well as directions for future research