Being Touched by Music: A Phenomenological-Hermeneutical Approach to Understanding Tranformational Musical Experience

This dissertation investigated the lived experience of being personally transformed by listening to music. The investigation started with an exploration of the literature that relates to the phenomenon of musical transformation, including natural-scientific research as well as ideas from musicology, ethnomusicology, psychology, literature, and philosophy. This research was designed to access the nuanced and subjective aspects of the phenomenon by attending to the experience as lived by the experiencer. The method was qualitative in nature, based on a phenomenological-hermeneutical methodology. Throughout the research process, the researcher maintained a reflexive stance, attending to assumptions and preconceptions held about the phenomenon. This was done to ensure that the understandings generated would retain a kind of self-consciousness, remaining open to reconsideration. The data set included written protocols and conversations with four musicians about moments when they felt personally transformed by listening to music. From this data, descriptive and interpretive understandings of their experiences were generated and an understanding of this kind of musical experience in general was articulated. Qualities found in this research to be integral to transformational musical experience include the following themes: Attunement to the experience, Apprehending the beautiful, Inhabiting a musical world, Being sound, Embodying music\u27s will, Connectedness, and Emerging transformed. Transformational musical experience was disclosed as a phenomenon that involves the creation of personal meaning that is co-constituted by the music and the listener in the face of apprehending beautiful sound. The results were discussed in dialogue with ideas from the literature, with particular focus on the experience of embodiment of the transformational experience, the felt sense of connection to others and to the music, and notions of meaning and emotionality in music

Single-Sex Schooling: Separate But Equal?

Does single-sex education significantly improve an individual’s future labor market outcome? Sherrilyn M. Billger, Illinois State University, attempted to answer this question in her research entitled, Reconstructing School Segregation? The Impact of Single-Sex Schooling on Labor Market Outcomes. Billger presented her findings to Illinois Wesleyan students and faculty on March 10, 2004

Implementation of a Microsoft Windows embedded standard system.

Many dedicated-use computer systems sold as complete products require a turn-key design delivered to the customer. This requires a system which is stable, secure, and serviceable. Adaptability of the system to existing software applications is a key consideration for many vendors. This thesis attempts to establish and gather best practices for designing, configuring, and building a Microsoft Windows Embedded Standard 2009 system. An existing real-world system will be used as a case study and example implementation. The end result will be a relatively compact, secure, and efficient Microsoft Windows Operating System image to support the target software application

Living Wage Ordinances

Since 1994, 130 municipalities have adopted living wage ordinances, which mandate that covered workers receive an hourly wage providing enough income to keep the individual above the poverty line. This study identifies what factors have lead to the proliferation of living wage laws across the United States while also determining what characteristics have prompted some municipalities to pass living wage ordinances while others have not. This research also considers the impact of living wages on municipalities that have adopted such laws. To further elucidate the issues associated with living wage ordinances, two cities—Baltimore and Los Angeles—are examined as case studies. Ultimately, this study concludes that municipalities that have adopted living wage laws share several characteristics and that living wage ordinances have provided significant benefits at relatively small costs

Improving Reading Skills by Encouraging Children to Read: A Randomized Evaluation of the Sa Aklat Sisikat Reading Program in the Philippines

We evaluate a program that aims to improve children's reading skills by providing classes with age-appropriate reading material and incentivizing children to read through a 31 day read-a-thon. During the read-a-thon, the program significantly increases the propensity of children to read, causing 20 percent more children to have read a book in the last week at school and increasing the number of books read by 2.3 in the last week and 7.2 in the last month. These increases extend both after the end of the program and outside of school, although at lower rates. The program also increased students’ scores on a reading assessment, causing students’ scores to improve by 0.13 standard deviations immediately after the program. The effect persisted even after the program ended with an effect of 0.06 standard deviations three months later.education, reading, development

Essays on Development Economics

This dissertation uses individual-level and aggregate data to study topics in development economics. The first chapter analyzes the impact of Chinese competition on Mexican labor markets. Over the past two decades, the growth of manufacturing in China has significantly impacted international trade. This paper explores how the dramatic rise in Chinese manufacturing exports influences employment in Mexico through product competition in the US export market. Following Autor, Dorn, and Hanson (2013), we compare employment outcomes for formal workers living in different Mexican labor markets to changes in Chinese import competition from 1993 to 2003. We find that exposure to Chinese competition has negative labor market effects for formally employed Mexican workers. In particular, a formally employed individual working in a labor market that experiences the average change in exposure to Chinese competition is 2.0 to 2.7 percentage points less likely to be formally employed in five years. The second chapter examines the under-reporting of workers wages in Mexico. Non-compliance of firms with tax regulations is a major constraint on state capacity in developing countries. We focus on an arguably under-appreciated dimension of non-compliance: under-reporting of wages by formal firms to evade payroll taxes. We compare two sources of wage information from Mexico --- firms' reports of individuals' wages to the Mexican social security agency and individuals' responses to a household labor-force survey --- to investigate the extent of wage under-reporting and how it responded to an important change in the social security system. We document that under-reporting by formal firms is extensive, and that compliance is better in larger firms. Using a difference-in-differences strategy based on the 1997 Mexican pension reform, which effectively tied pension benefits more closely to reported wages for younger workers than for older workers, we show that the reform led to a relative decline in under-reporting for younger workers. The empirical patterns suggest that giving employees incentives and information to improve the accuracy of employer reports can be an effective way to improve payroll-tax compliance. The third chapter studies the effect of trade liberalization on fertility, sex ratios, and infant mortality in India. We compare women and births in rural Indian districts more or less exposed to tariff cuts. For low socioeconomic status women, tariff cuts increase the likelihood of a female birth and these daughters are less likely to die during infancy and childhood. On the contrary, high-status women are less likely to give birth to girls and their daughters have higher mortality rates when more exposed to tariff declines. Consistent with the fertility-sex ratio trade-off in high son preference societies, fertility increases for low-status women and decreases for high-status women. An exploration of the mechanisms suggests that the labor market returns for low-status women (relative to men) and high-status men (relative to women) have increased in response to trade liberalization. Thus, altered expectations about future returns from daughters relative to sons seem to have caused families to change the sex-composition of and health investments in their children

Gerrymandering in Redlands, California

In April 2016, the City of Redlands, California, began the process of creating council electoral districts to comply with voting rights acts and avoid litigation. Several maps prepared by a consultant were being considered when, in May 2017, a group of graduate students from the University of Redlands produced this map. The Council agreed that this map was as good as or better than the consultant’s maps, but it was too late to consider a new map giving the legislative requirements. It will be considered after the 2018 elections