CONTESTED HISTORIES AND IDENTITIES: ROMANI REFUGEES IN TORONTO

This thesis examines the larger themes and processes involved in identity reconstructions, and the appropriation of labels and categories at various levels as part of a struggle by the Roma against their marginalization and persecution. Through a focus on several significant sites of negotiation and contestation where Romani actors encounter and interface with hegemonic institutions and discourses, including current Canadian immigration policies and media coverage, I propose that “identities” invoke historical narratives, whether individual or collective, and are used in diverse ways. This research on the Roma is also useful in understanding the experiences of other refugees and minorities when examining state policies and is intended to fill the current gap in the anthropological literature on Romani communiti

Essays on Resource Allocation Efficiency and Behavior

This dissertation is comprised of three papers in the field of microeconomics. The first examines bidder’s choice auctions using both field and laboratory experiments. The field experiments demonstrate that traditional bidder’s choice auction theory does not always hold; the laboratory experiments subsequently isolate several characteristics of this auction format to explain why. We find that while price revelation does not impact the revenue superiority of the auction mechanism, multi-good demand significantly reduces the revenue premium. Intuitively, risk aversion plays less of a role when bidders have the opportunity to win multiple goods. The second chapter is theoretical and presents a dynamic Markov labor market tournament in which the manager does not have the ability to incentivize agents using money. Instead, the manager can use task assignment to reward and punish agents who are in and out of favor with him. This situation frequently characterizes public organizations such as schools and government agencies. The prize of the tournament is the difference between groups in the present value of the agent’s expected utility. We show that when the manager must delegate a certain number of tasks and when agents’ cost of contractible effort is a convex function, the manager can incentivize optimal non-contractible effort by agents. However, the total cost to the manager is higher than if the manager was able to use monetary incentives. The third chapter is an experimental paper that elicits consumer willingness to pay for food products labelled “natural”. The “natural” label is not regulated in the United States; however, several manufacturers are currently under lawsuit for selling “natural”-labelled food that contains genetically modified ingredients. This study uses an incentive-compatible mechanism and a survey to connect consumers’ beliefs to the premium that they associate with the “natural” label. Primarily, we find that consumers who believe “natural” means “no genetically modified organisms” (42% of our sample) are willing to pay a premium for “natural” food, whereas consumers who do not have this belief actually exhibit a negative premium. The overall effect is near zero, although the identified heterogeneity suggests that “natural” labels are potentially misleading

CONTESTED HISTORIES AND IDENTITIES: ROMANI REFUGEES IN TORONTO

This thesis examines the larger themes and processes involved in identity reconstructions, and the appropriation of labels and categories at various levels as part of a struggle by the Roma against their marginalization and persecution. Through a focus on several significant sites of negotiation and contestation where Romani actors encounter and interface with hegemonic institutions and discourses, including current Canadian immigration policies and media coverage, I propose that “identities” invoke historical narratives, whether individual or collective, and are used in diverse ways. This research on the Roma is also useful in understanding the experiences of other refugees and minorities when examining state policies and is intended to fill the current gap in the anthropological literature on Romani communitie

Field experiments and meta-analysis reveal wetland vegetation as a crucial element in the coastal protection paradigm

Increasing rates of sea-level rise and wave action threaten coastal populations. Defense of shorelines by protection and restoration of wetlands has been invoked as a win-win strategy for humans and nature, yet evidence from field experiments supporting the wetland protection function is uncommon, as is the understanding of its context dependency. Here we provide evidence from field manipulations showing that the loss of wetland vegetation, regardless of disturbance size, increases the rate of erosion on wave-stressed shorelines. Vegetation removal (simulated disturbance) along the edge of salt marshes reveals that loss of wetland plants elevates the rate of lateral erosion and that extensive root systems, rather than aboveground biomass, are primarily responsible for protection against edge erosion in marshes. Meta-analysis further shows that disturbances that generate plant dieoff on salt marsh edges generally hasten edge erosion in coastal marshes and that the erosion protection function of wetlands relates more to lateral than vertical edge-erosional processes and is positively correlated with the amount of below-ground plant biomass lost. Collectively, our findings substantiate a coastal protection paradigm that incorporates preservation of shoreline vegetation, illuminate key context dependencies in this theory, and highlight local disturbances (e.g., oil spills) that kill wetland plants as agents that can accelerate coastal erosion

Social Networks and Non-market Valuations *

Abstract This paper considers the role of social networks in the non-market valuation of public goods. In the model individuals derive utility from both their own direct enjoyment of the public good as well as from the enjoyment of those in their network. We find that network structure almost always matters, both for utility and for valuation. The network increases aggregate valuation when it assigns higher importance, that is, greater total weight, to individuals with higher private values for the public good. The model provides a theoretical foundation for the idea of opinion leaders who have disproportionate influence over their communities. Specifically, opinion leaders are individuals assigned high importance by the network, and projects favored by opinion leaders tend to be favored by the network as a whole. The model can also guide future empirical studies by enabling a more structural approach to non-market valuation in a socially-connected group

Cross-oncopanel study reveals high sensitivity and accuracy with overall analytical performance depending on genomic regions.

Targeted sequencing using oncopanels requires comprehensive assessments of accuracy and detection sensitivity to ensure analytical validity. By employing reference materials characterized by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration-led SEquence Quality Control project phase2 (SEQC2) effort, we perform a cross-platform multi-lab evaluation of eight Pan-Cancer panels to assess best practices for oncopanel sequencing. All panels demonstrate high sensitivity across targeted high-confidence coding regions and variant types for the variants previously verified to have variant allele frequency (VAF) in the 5-20% range. Sensitivity is reduced by utilizing VAF thresholds due to inherent variability in VAF measurements. Enforcing a VAF threshold for reporting has a positive impact on reducing false positive calls. Importantly, the false positive rate is found to be significantly higher outside the high-confidence coding regions, resulting in lower reproducibility. Thus, region restriction and VAF thresholds lead to low relative technical variability in estimating promising biomarkers and tumor mutational burden. This comprehensive study provides actionable guidelines for oncopanel sequencing and clear evidence that supports a simplified approach to assess the analytical performance of oncopanels. It will facilitate the rapid implementation, validation, and quality control of oncopanels in clinical use.All SEQC2 participants freely donated their time, reagents, and computing resources for the completion and analysis of this project. Part of this work was carried out with the support of the Intramural Research Program of the National Institutes of Health (to Mehdi Pirooznia), National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (to Pierre Bushel), and National Library of Medicine (to Danielle Thierry-Mieg, Jean Thierry-Mieg, and Chunlin Xiao). Leming Shi and Yuanting Zheng were supported by the National Key R&D Project of China (2018YFE0201600), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (31720103909), and Shanghai Municipal Science and Technology Major Project (2017SHZDZX01). Donald J. Johann, Jr. acknowledges the support by FDA BAA grant HHSF223201510172C. Timothy Mercer and Ira Deveson were supported by the National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) of Australia grants APP1108254, APP1114016, and APP1173594 and Cancer Institute NSW Early Career Fellowship 2018/ECF013. This research has also been, in part, financially supported by the MEYS of the CR under the project CEITEC 2020 (LQ1601), by MH CR, grant No. (NV19-03-00091). Part of this work was carried out with the support of research infrastructure EATRIS-CZ, ID number LM2015064, funded by MEYS CR. Boris Tichy and Nikola Tom were supported by research infrastructure EATRIS-CZ, ID number LM2018133 funded by MEYS CR and MEYS CR project CEITEC 2020 (LQ1601).S

Café Shapiro Anthology, Selected Poems and Short Stories from the 21st Annual Café Shapiro

Search only availability in HathiTrust.https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/143198/4/CafeShapiro_2018.pdf32