The Art of Camille Rose Garcia: An Existential Fairy Tale

Camille Rose Garcia is part of a contemporary underground art movement known as Pop Surrealism. An apparent dream-like and unexpected nature borrows from the oeuvre of Surrealism, while an allusion to the familiar and popular denotes similarities to the comic culture of the 1930s and Pop Art of the 1960s. Garcia\u27s paintings are laced with the personal remnants of childhood memories that recall frequent trips to Disneyland and visits to her grandparent\u27s cabin tucked away in the redwood forests of Northern California. Her artwork, a haunting recipe of sweet and sour, beautiful and grotesque, ominous and nostalgic, travels through Los Angeles\u27s counterculture to paint the story of a machine-driven, violence-ridden, pill-popping society that has seemingly turned its back on the good, the human, and the existential. The twentieth century was marked by an invasion of tract homes, multi-national corporations, rising government intervention into everyday life, mass production, and an unending stream of consumer goods. Popular products and age old stories were hollowed out and embedded with myths to help increase sales. Therefore, it is not surprising that postmodern thinkers proclaimed the demise of the human subject. The twenty-first century must now try to makes sense of this phenomenon. Adopting the definition of myth presented by Roland Barthes in his essay Myth Today, this thesis posits that through its appropriation of Disney imagery and use of narrative motifs from classic fairy tales, the art of Camille Rose Garcia forces the viewer to compare, interpret, and choose

Influences on Consumer Engagement with Sustainability and the Purchase Intention of Apparel Products

Apparel and textile products are filling landfills and contributing to extensive waste found across the world. Much of the textile waste is due to the typical consumer not being aware of the care for, disposal of, and sustainable options for textile products. To identify consumers’ intention to engage in sustainable practices and the intention to purchase sustainable apparel options, this study measured consumers’ attitudes, subjective norms, and perceived behavioral controls. Data were collected from a sample of 397 participants through a Qualtrics online survey disseminated on Amazon’s MTurk. Results of the multiple regression analysis yielded three of note: (1) a positive attitude toward recycling and the environment is related to a higher intention to engage in sustainable behavior, (2) a positive attitude toward green apparel products leads to a higher intention to purchase sustainable products, and (3) family and friends and the convenience of finding sustainable apparel products in stores have also influenced the purchase of sustainable apparel. Thus, this study provides significant insights into both intention to engage in sustainable behavior and the intention to purchase sustainable products and serves as a foundation for future studies on the sustainable engagement and purchase intention toward sustainable products

Life After Prison: Tracking the Experiences of Male Prisoners Returning to Chicago, Cleveland, and Houston

Examines the reentry experiences of 652 men in the three cities, including housing stability, family relationships, substance use, employment, and recidivism. Analyzes outcome predictors such as prison programs, job training, and family structure

DYMOND: DYnamic MOtif-NoDes Network Generative Model

Motifs, which have been established as building blocks for network structure, move beyond pair-wise connections to capture longer-range correlations in connections and activity. In spite of this, there are few generative graph models that consider higher-order network structures and even fewer that focus on using motifs in models of dynamic graphs. Most existing generative models for temporal graphs strictly grow the networks via edge addition, and the models are evaluated using static graph structure metrics -- which do not adequately capture the temporal behavior of the network. To address these issues, in this work we propose DYnamic MOtif-NoDes (DYMOND) -- a generative model that considers (i) the dynamic changes in overall graph structure using temporal motif activity and (ii) the roles nodes play in motifs (e.g., one node plays the hub role in a wedge, while the remaining two act as spokes). We compare DYMOND to three dynamic graph generative model baselines on real-world networks and show that DYMOND performs better at generating graph structure and node behavior similar to the observed network. We also propose a new methodology to adapt graph structure metrics to better evaluate the temporal aspect of the network. These metrics take into account the changes in overall graph structure and the individual nodes' behavior over time.Comment: In Proceedings of the Web Conference 2021 (WWW '21

A Simulation Analysis of an Emergency Department Fast Track System

The basis for this thesis involved a four month Accelerate Canada internship at the Grand River Hospital Emergency Department in Kitchener, Ontario. The Emergency Department (ED) Process Committee sought insight into strategies that could potentially reduce patient length of stay in the ED, thereby reducing wait times for emergency patients. This thesis uses discrete event simulation to model the overall system and to analyze the effect of various operational strategies within the fast track area of the emergency department. It discusses the design and development process for the simulation model, proposes various operational strategies to reduce patient wait times, and analyzes the different scenarios for an optimal fast track strategy. The main contribution of this thesis is the use of simulation to determine an optimal fast track strategy that reduces patient length of stay, thereby reducing patient wait times. Wait times were most significantly reduced when there was an increased physician presence/availability towards the fast track system. This had the greatest impact on the total time spent in the ED and also on queue length. The second most significant reduction to the performance measures occurred when an additional emergency nurse practitioner was supplemented to the fast track system. Accordingly, the nurse practitioner’s percent utilization increased. There was only one two-way interaction effect that was statistically significant in reducing the primary performance measure of wait times; however, the effect did not change the queue length, a secondary performance measure, by a significant amount. Finally, the implementation of a See-and-treat model variant for fast track had a negligible effect on both the average length of stay and queue length

Double crystallographic groups and their representations on the Bilbao Crystallographic Server

A new section of databases and programs devoted to double crystallographic groups (point and space groups) has been implemented in the Bilbao Crystallographic Server (http://www.cryst.ehu.es). The double crystallographic groups are required in the study of physical systems whose Hamiltonian includes spin-dependent terms. In the symmetry analysis of such systems, instead of the irreducible representations of the space groups, it is necessary to consider the single- and double-valued irreducible representations of the double space groups. The new section includes databases of symmetry operations (DGENPOS) and of irreducible representations of the double (point and space) groups (REPRESENTATIONS DPG and REPRESENTATIONS DSG). The tool DCOMPATIBILITY RELATIONS provides compatibility relations between the irreducible representations of double space groups at different k-vectors of the Brillouin zone when there is a group-subgroup relation between the corresponding little groups. The program DSITESYM implements the so-called site-symmetry approach, which establishes symmetry relations between localized and extended crystal states, using representations of the double groups. As an application of this approach, the program BANDREP calculates the band representations and the elementary band representations induced from any Wyckoff position of any of the 230 double space groups, giving information about the properties of these bands. Recently, the results of BANDREP have been extensively applied in the description and the search of topological insulators.Comment: 32 pages, 20 figures. Two extra figures and minor typo mistakes fixed. Published versio

Inmate Sincerity via Community Reentry

While numerous states have programs within their prisons, community reentry-to-society is a topical area of focus. These programs require little operational funding but have a direct impact on rehabilitation of inmates. Reentry often involves outside volunteers who share invaluable lessons with inmates. With the use of precious correctional resources at issue perpetually, this study is important in examining the validity of a portion of the reentry application forms used in an Arkansas state reentry program. Findings should be of use to corrections officials, researchers and those with any interest in rehabilitation