Stopping The Presses: Evaluating The Effectiveness Of The 2013 Justice Department’s New Protections For Journalists

The Obama Administration ushered in a new era of accountability and communication between the government and those it governs. With the rise of social media and the creation of White House accounts on various platforms it seemed as if the Obama administration was taking his pledge to have the most transparent presidency of all time to serious heights. However, during the first term of the Obama administration, the justice department under Attorney General Eric Holder set some dangerous precedents. The justice department pursued several prosecutions of people who had leaked government secrets and developed a successful formula for these cases by way of the Espionage Act. Out of this behavior, a new landscape for the relationship between the government and the media was formed. After backlash, they conducted a review and used experts from outside the Whitehouse in the media, and academia to provide feedback. They then released a list of protections and new policies to protect journalists to undo the precedents they may have set and encourage future due diligence in the prosecutorial process regarding the role of media in leaks. I am evaluating how effective those protections are and whether they accomplish the goals they set out to meet.Plan II Honors Progra

Women and handicrafts: Myth and reality

This issue of SEEDS reviews handicrafts as a means of providing income to women. In some instances, crafts are a solid source of income and can also provide women with a link to their own cultural heritage. In most instances, however, crafts production concentrates women in an area that is labor intensive and exploitative, providing a meager income for long hours of work. Handicrafts can be a means of increasing income for women in some settings, but only under the conditions outlined in this report, since crafts are specialized activities which have limited markets and offer limited potential as a means of employment. The report summarizes a few of the key issues that must be addressed when considering a handicrafts program for women

Factors Related to Self-Identification of Candidacy, Device Selection, and Self-Fitting of Over-The-Counter Hearing Aids

Purpose: The Over-The-Counter (OTC) Hearing Aid Act was introduced in an effort to make hearing aids more accessible and affordable. Implementation of this law will go into effect in 2020. It is assumed that the average consumer will be able to self-navigate an OTC hearing aid fitting. In the OTC hearing aid model consumers are expected to self-diagnose, self-treat, and self manage their hearing loss. The purpose of the present study was to assess how well the average consumer can perform each step in the OTC hearing aid model, and identify factors related to self-identification of candidacy, device selection, and self-fitting of an OTC hearing aid. Method: Participants included 52 adults who were 40 years of age and older, self-reported having trouble hearing and were interested in trying an OTC hearing aid. They had to have owned a smartphone and had no prior hearing aid experience. Data was collected over two tests sessions. During the first session all participants were asked to report their degree of hearing loss, identify if they thought they were at risk for having ear disease, and completed questionnaires related to demographics, health literacy, hearing aid self-efficacy, health locus of control, and technology commitment and usage. Also, participants completed three cognitive tasks and were given a hearing test and administered three cognitive measures: the Reading-SPAN, Digit Symbol Substitution Task, and the Simon task. During the second test session participants were asked to browse three different OTC hearing aids online and select the device they preferred. They were asked to complete a questionnaire regarding potential reasons for why they selected a particular device. The OTC hearing aid they selected was given in its original packaging, and participants were asked to set the device up without any assistance. The Practical Hearing Aid Skills Test- Revised (PHAST-R) along with three questions related to Bluetooth connectivity was used to evaluate the participants’ hearing aid handling skills. Real-ear verification was performed to assess how closely the participant’s settings were to NAL-NL2 prescriptive targets. Last, participants completed the Consumer Ear Disease Risk Assessment (CEDRA) to determine if participants correctly self-identified the risk for ear-disease. Results: Only 38% of participants were able to correctly classify their hearing status in both ears, with pure tone average being a significant predictor of correct hearing status classification. A majority of the participants who misclassified their hearing status had normal hearing, but self-reported they had a hearing loss. Eighty-eight percent of the participants who were identified for being at risk for ear disease misclassified their risk for ear disease. Years of education was inversely related to correctly self-identifying risk for ear disease. Sixty percent of the participants who were flagged by the CEDRA and 30% of normal-hearing participants indicated that they would purchase an OTC hearing aid at the end of the study. Participants’ scores ranged from 45-100% on the PHAST-R and Bluetooth connectivity assessment. The type of the manufacturer’s instructional material was significantly associated with participants’ hearing aid and Bluetooth connectivity skills. For the normal-hearing participants all of the OTC devices attenuated speech, and none of the devices met NAL-NL2 targets in the high frequencies for the hearing-impaired participants. Income status and technology commitment was not predictive of OTC hearing aid device selection and all participants ranked ‘easy to read descriptions’ and ‘website appearance’ as the main factors that influenced their decision to select a device. Conclusions: Most participants were unable to successfully navigate all of the steps in the OTC hearing aid model. Some of the participants who had normal hearing but self-reported a hearing loss and the participants who were at risk for ear disease said they would purchase an OTC hearing aid as a treatment option. Unfortunately, both groups are not the intended user of an OTC hearing aid. Manufacturer instructional material can impact set up and programming of an OTC device. However, users may still run into fitting and programming challenges that will require the assistance of a hearing health care professional

The Effect of the 2016 Presidential Election on Sikh-Americans’ Perceptions of Safety in Texas

Since the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center, members of the Sikh-American community have been the subjects of random hate crimes in the United States because of their distinct identity, namely the turban. During and after the 2016 presidential election, many minority groups, including Sikh-Americans, were concerned over the rhetoric the then-candidate Donald Trump had been using. The focus of this research project was to study if the rhetoric used during the presidential campaign had any effect on how Sikh-Americans perceived their safety in a politically conservative state like Texas. The methods used to collect data were both qualitative and quantitative in nature. The qualitative portion was collected from one-on-one interviews with Sikh-Americans, and the quantitative portion was collected from surveys taken in gurdwaras (Sikh religious temples) located in both the Dallas-Fort Worth and Houston metroplexes. From the interviews and surveys, it was concluded that 27.6% of turban wearers felt threatened because of their appearance and felt a general feeling of discomfort from others’ lack of knowledge of Sikhism. Despite not having a distinct appearance, 28.6% of the non-turban wearing male respondents felt threatened sometime before and after the presidential election for their religious affiliation. From the results, it can be concluded that many Sikh-Americans feel unsafe living in Texas as Sikhs because of religious misidentification and intolerance

Risk factors for paternal depression and anxiety in the perinatal period

Jasleen Chhabra explored the risk factors associated with paternal perinatal mental distress. She found that masculine gender role stress was a unique risk factor of paternal perinatal mental distress. The results from this thesis can be used to develop interventions which are specific for fathers who are experiencing perinatal distress

Effects of Arbuscular Mycorrhizal Fungi (AMF) on Growth and Herbivore Defenses in Sorghum Sudangrass (Sorghum X drummondii)

Chapter 2: In this chapter we have examined the role of trichomes in plant stress biology, reviewed the studies on herbivore X trichome interactions, and their role in plant defences. Ultimately, we have proposed new areas of research for future work. Chapter 3: In this chapter, we examined whether AMF has cascading effects on insect community dynamics through attraction/repulsion of beneficial and damaging insects using Sorghum-sudangrass (Sorghum x drummondii), either inoculated with commercial AMF mix or left as control in lab and field experiments. Our results suggest positive effects of AMF on plant growth, and a lower initial incidence of fall armyworm (Spodoptera frugiperda), a major herbivore on Sorghum in the region. Besides, AMF inoculated plants attracted significantly more beneficial insects (predators and parasitoids) and a lower number of damaging herbivores. Therefore, our data suggests that AMF can have implications for sustainable pest management strategies

Polca SARA - Full polarization, direction-dependent calibration and sparse imaging for radio interferometry

New generation of radio interferometers are envisaged to produce high quality, high dynamic range Stokes images of the observed sky from the corresponding under-sampled Fourier domain measurements. In practice, these measurements are contaminated by the instrumental and atmospheric effects that are well represented by Jones matrices, and are most often varying with observation direction and time. These effects, usually unknown, act as a limiting factor in achieving the required imaging performance and thus, their calibration is crucial. To address this issue, we develop a global algorithm, named Polca SARA, aiming to perform full polarization, direction-dependent calibration and sparse imaging by employing a non-convex optimization technique. In contrast with the existing approaches, the proposed method offers global convergence guarantees and flexibility to incorporate sophisticated priors to regularize the imaging as well as the calibration problem. Thus, we adapt a polarimetric imaging specific method, enforcing the physical polarization constraint along with a sparsity prior for the sought images. We perform extensive simulation studies of the proposed algorithm. While indicating the superior performance of polarization constraint based imaging, the obtained results also highlight the importance of calibrating for direction-dependent effects as well as for off-diagonal terms (denoting polarization leakage) in the associated Jones matrices, without inclusion of which the imaging quality deteriorates