Sisterhood and Survival: An Exploration of Women\u27s Relationships in Feminist Speculative Fiction

Writers have used the genre of feminist speculative fiction as a lens through which to view modern issues which effect women. Octavia Butler’s Kindred, Margaret Atwood’ Handmaid’s Tale, and Naomi Alderman’s The Power each explore dystopian or transitory dystopian societies in which women are pitted against one another for the sake of their survival. In reviewing the relationships which the women in these novels have to each other we stand to gain insights into the ways in which sisterhood influences change in these societies. Each of these works, while centering around different understandings of dystopian society, also prominently feature the ways in which women’s individual relationships with each other are changed or influenced by these societies. The unique ability for these authors to not only reflect patriarchal societies and values, but also the relationships which are strained or created by the exacerbation of violent patriarchal societies, creates an avenue of exploration into the ways women interact within the context of the real world. The work of this thesis centers around the analysis and understanding of these relationships, and the importance which the representation of women’s relationships in dystopian fiction has in relation to the genre as a whole

The conditioned reconstructed process

We investigate a neutral model for speciation and extinction, the constant rate birth-death process. The process is conditioned to have $n$ extant species today, we look at the tree distribution of the reconstructed trees-- i.e. the trees without the extinct species. Whereas the tree shape distribution is well-known and actually the same as under the pure birth process, no analytic results for the speciation times were known. We provide the distribution for the speciation times and calculate the expectations analytically. This characterizes the reconstructed trees completely. We will show how the results can be used to date phylogenies

Estimating the relative order of speciation or coalescence events on a given phylogeny

The reconstruction of large phylogenetic trees from data that violates clocklike evolution (or as a supertree constructed from any m input trees) raises a difficult question for biologists - how can one assign relative dates to the vertices of the tree? In this paper we investigate this problem, assuming a uniform distribution on the order of the inner vertices of the tree (which includes, but is more general than, the popular Yule distribution on trees). We derive fast algorithms for computing the probability that (i) any given vertex in the tree was the j--th speciation event (for each j), and (ii) any one given vertex is earlier in the tree than a second given vertex. We show how the first algorithm can be used to calculate the expected length of any given interior edge in any given tree that has been generated under either a constant-rate speciation model, or the coalescent model

Calibrated Tree Priors for Relaxed Phylogenetics and Divergence Time Estimation

The use of fossil evidence to calibrate divergence time estimation has a long history. More recently Bayesian MCMC has become the dominant method of divergence time estimation and fossil evidence has been re-interpreted as the specification of prior distributions on the divergence times of calibration nodes. These so-called "soft calibrations" have become widely used but the statistical properties of calibrated tree priors in a Bayesian setting has not been carefully investigated. Here we clarify that calibration densities, such as those defined in BEAST 1.5, do not represent the marginal prior distribution of the calibration node. We illustrate this with a number of analytical results on small trees. We also describe an alternative construction for a calibrated Yule prior on trees that allows direct specification of the marginal prior distribution of the calibrated divergence time, with or without the restriction of monophyly. This method requires the computation of the Yule prior conditional on the height of the divergence being calibrated. Unfortunately, a practical solution for multiple calibrations remains elusive. Our results suggest that direct estimation of the prior induced by specifying multiple calibration densities should be a prerequisite of any divergence time dating analysis

Quaestionum Platonicarum specimen alterum commentationem tertiam continens in libr. De rep. II, 20. III, 3. IV, 21 V, 8

https://repository.brynmawr.edu/digitizedbooks/1074/thumbnail.jp

Quaestionum Platonicarum specimen alterum commentationem tertiam continens in libr. De rep. II, 20. III, 3. IV, 21 V, 8

https://repository.brynmawr.edu/digitizedbooks/1074/thumbnail.jp