Mental Maps, Occupation... Liberation? The Impact of the Israel-Palestine Conflict on the Security and Legitimacy of the State of Israel and the Struggle of Palestine

The Israel-Palestine issue has been present for decades, making it one of the world’s most prominent unresolved conflicts. Conflict for Israel-Palestine over the years has meant war, border insecurity, questions of legitimacy and sovereignty, and today, the role of the international community in the issue. One of the most paradoxical aspects of the Israel-Palestine issue is that Israel’s unequal treatment of Palestinians in the occupied territories could be against Israel’s own interests in the long run. Given this conflict, the purpose of this paper, while contextualizing the long and divided historical nature of this issue, was to focus on the role that mental maps play in Israeli, Palestinian, and other theoretical perceptions of borders and legitimacy. The paper also sought to understand the role that International Humanitarian Law and International Human Rights Law play in the conflict. Ultimately, the paper is intended to conclude how each of these ways in which borders are established— through mental maps and through legitimate corridors— come together to impact Israeli and Palestinian state legitimacy. The research methods include both qualitative and quantitative sources, with a series of formally conducted face-to-face interviews as well as analysis of peer-reviewed books and articles. My results indicate that finding where mental maps and international law come together and intersect is the most logical approach to understanding state legitimacy. My conclusion explores how we might extrapolate potential solutions from an analysis of Israeli and Palestinian state legitimacy

COMPUTER GENERATED PAPERS AS A NEW CHALLENGE TO PEER REVIEW

Computer generated papers (CGP) pose a serious problem to academic integrity and publishing. The problem began with SCIgen. Created in 2005 by MIT students, SCIgen is a software program that generates papers with simulated content. In 2014, we learned that more than 120 CGP passed through the peer review process, were published in well-known academic journals, and had to be retracted. I conducted research into the journal editing and peer review process to discover more about this problem and how it might be remedied. I conducted interviews with five journal editors from across the world, coded the information, and performed a thematic analysis. My thesis concludes with recommendations to control the CGP problem, including: increased awareness on the part of journal editors, CGP detection software, improving due diligence on the part of reviewers, and addressing the publish or perish paradigm that drives desperate faculty to compromise academic integrity by submitting CGP to journals

The marginalization project

The vast majority of African American residents in Chicago, Illinois reside in low food access areas particularly on the South and West Sides of the city. There are overwhelmingly high rates poverty, residential segregation, and limitations to quality of food. Through remapping abandoned spaces throughout the South and West Sides of Chicago, the community is working on implementing more community food gardens to these dying neighborhoods to bring a sense of hope, peace, and prosperity. My research focuses on the effectiveness of how community food gardens resist racially and ethnically oppressive spatial rhetorics. This study aims to bring awareness to the racial and health disparities that these struggling communities are facing. Throughout my thesis, I am arguing that it is imperative that the city adds even more community food gardens so all residents have access to fresh fruits and vegetables. In my results section, I compiled charts that track the access of total number of grocery stores, fast food businesses, community food gardens, and all types of transportation within specific neighborhoods on the South Side of Chicago. Overall, my thesis brings light to these important issues regarding spatial rhetoric and how mapping of space affects people of color in a negative way. One major limitation while researching on this topic was the government’s control on community food gardens regarding laws and regulations that were put in place. In conclusion, my goal was to start to bring these concerns to the forefront and discuss possible solutions to start to have conversations about these complex health issues that have affected Black families for generations. More research is needed in the field of health equality to ultimately reduce the disparity

Burning, Drowning, Shining, Blooming: The Shapes of Aging in W.B. Yeats’ Poetry

Love and growing old are thematically inseparable in W.B. Yeats\u27 poetry, yet it is the former with which this great Irish poet is often associated. The poet\u27s attitudes toward aging are made clear through his symbolism, complicated Irish allusions, and a sometimes jarring treatment of women. As it turns out, these devices have as much to do with Yeats\u27 concern over aging as they have to do with the infamous Maud Gonne. This thesis attempts to not only expose and analyze these intricacies, but also challenge the way the literary canon typically isolates Yeats’ more famous poems without the context of his other work

Doctor of Philosophy

dissertationSkeletal muscle is among the few adult tissues with the capacity to regenerate after injury. This is due to the resident stem cells within the muscle, the satellite cells. In the absence of injury, these stem cells remain quiescent and reside within their niche beneath the basement membrane adjacent to the myofiber. Upon muscle injury, satellite cells are activated and will proliferate, self renew, and differentiate into transiently amplifying myoblasts, which also self renew and give rise to differentiating myocytes. These myocytes will fuse to themselves and to the injured myofibers to repair muscle damage. While the cellular processes of muscle regeneration are understood, many questions remain. Despite similarities in their expression patterns and function, many characteristics are dissimilar between developmental myogenic precursors and satellite cells. Chapter 2 of this dissertation reviews what is known about the unique properties of these closely related cells, and Chapter 3 of this dissertation directly tests the requirement of satellite cells during muscle regeneration. In addition to the myogenic cells, many nonmuscle cells are involved in the process of muscle regeneration. Chapter 3 of this dissertation also shows that connective tissue fibroblasts prevent premature differentiation of satellite cells and are an important component of the satellite cell niche. One signaling pathway shown to regulate stem cells in other tissue contexts is the Wnt/beta-catenin pathway. Multiple studies describe the role of Wnt/beta-catenin signaling in muscle regeneration; however, there is no consensus as to the functional role of this signaling pathway in adult myogenesis. In Chapter 4 of this dissertation, the requirement for Wnt/beta-catenin in the satellite cells and their progeny is tested in vivo. Surprisingly, despite evidence that the Wnt/beta-catenin signaling pathway is active in myogenic cells during regeneration, satellite cells and their progeny do not require beta-catenin. Chapter 4 also discusses our results that show that extension of Wnt/beta-catenin signaling prolongs the time myogenic cells spend in the myoblast phase of regeneration. This dissertation demonstrates the importance of the connective tissue fibroblasts and also critically tests the function of the Wnt/beta-catenin signaling pathway in muscle regeneration

Crossing the academic ocean? Judit Bar-Ilan's oeuvre on search engines studies

[EN] The main objective of this work is to analyse the contributions of Judit Bar-Ilan to the search engines studies. To do this, two complementary approaches have been carried out. First, a systematic literature review of 47 publications authored and co-authored by Judit and devoted to this topic. Second, an interdisciplinarity analysis based on the cited references (publications cited by Judit) and citing documents (publications that cite Judit's work) through Scopus. The systematic literature review unravels an immense amount of search engines studied (43) and indicators measured (especially technical precision, overlap and fluctuation over time). In addition to this, an evolution over the years is detected from descriptive statistical studies towards empirical user studies, with a mixture of quantitative and qualitative methods. Otherwise, the interdisciplinary analysis evidences that a significant portion of Judit's oeuvre was intellectually founded on the computer sciences, achieving a significant, but not exclusively, impact on library and information sciences.Orduña-Malea, E. (2020). Crossing the academic ocean? Judit Bar-Ilan's oeuvre on search engines studies. Scientometrics. 123(3):1317-1340. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-020-03450-4S131713401233Bar-Ilan, J. (1998a). On the overlap, the precision and estimated recall of search engines. A case study of the query “Erdos”. Scientometrics,42(2), 207–228. https://doi.org/10.1007/bf02458356.Bar-Ilan, J. (1998b). The mathematician, Paul Erdos (1913–1996) in the eyes of the Internet. Scientometrics,43(2), 257–267. https://doi.org/10.1007/bf02458410.Bar-Ilan, J. (2000). The web as an information source on informetrics? A content analysis. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology,51(5), 432–443. https://doi.org/10.1002/(sici)1097-4571(2000)51:5%3C432:aid-asi4%3E3.0.co;2-7.Bar-Ilan, J. (2001). Data collection methods on the web for informetric purposes: A review and analysis. Scientometrics,50(1), 7–32.Bar-Ilan, J. (2002). Methods for measuring search engine performance over time. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology,53(4), 308–319. https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.10047.Bar-Ilan, J. (2003). Search engine results over time: A case study on search engine stability. Cybermetrics,2/3, 1–16.Bar-Ilan, J. (2005a). Expectations versus reality—Search engine features needed for Web research at mid 2005. Cybermetrics,9, 1–26.Bar-Ilan, J. (2005b). Expectations versus reality—Web search engines at the beginning of 2005. In Proceedings of ISSI 2005: 10th international conference of the international society for scientometrics and informetrics (Vol. 1, pp. 87–96).Bar-Ilan, J. (2010). The WIF of Peter Ingwersen’s website. In B. Larsen, J. W. Schneider, & F. Åström (Eds.), The Janus Faced Scholar a Festschrift in honour of Peter Ingwersen (pp. 119–121). Det Informationsvidenskabelige Akademi. Retrieved 15 January 15, 2020, from https://vbn.aau.dk/ws/portalfiles/portal/90357690/JanusFacedScholer_Festschrift_PeterIngwersen_2010.pdf#page=122.Bar-Ilan, J. (2018). Eugene Garfield on the web in 2001. Scientometrics,114(2), 389–399. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-017-2590-9.Bar-Ilan, J., Mat-Hassan, M., & Levene, M. (2006). Methods for comparing rankings of search engine results. Computer Networks,50(10), 1448–1463. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.comnet.2005.10.020.Thelwall, M. (2017). Judit Bar-Ilan: Information scientist, computer scientist, scientometrician. Scientometrics,113(3), 1235–1244. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-017-2551-3