U.S. Presidential Leadership and Crisis Rhetoric

My capstone project seeks to determine what are U.S. presidents attempting to accomplish in (or with) their speeches? This matters because presidential responses to crises can reflect how a president’s leadership abilities are perceived by the people he serves. This perception plays a large role in determining how much political strength the president has to accomplish his agenda. I address this research question by analyzing four different speeches: President Kennedy’s Address to the American Society of Newspaper Editors on the Bay of Pigs, President Kennedy’s Address on the Cuban Missile Crisis, President Bush’s National Cathedral Speech after the September 11th attacks and President Bush’s speech in Jackson Square after Hurricane Katrina. I seek to determine whether or not these speeches are considered either “successes” or “failures” based off of public approval ratings and polls provided by sources such as Gallup. I analyzed factors such as the tone and political context of the speeches to explore why the presidents are using specific rhetorical strategies. My argument is that, although approval ratings matters in determining public approval, other factors, such as political context and the location of the speeches, also play a role in determining how people view the success of the president’s address and overall handling of the crisis. In addition, I also would like to acknowledge that the speeches will not directly cause a “solution” to the crisis. The purpose of my study is to examine whether the president was able to accomplish his goals in his speeches given during the crisis. I believe that the political context in particular will play a large role in explaining the president’s goals and a specific agenda for their given speeches. While there are various ways in which success and failure can be measured, this project does so by looking at public approval ratings after the speeches

Improving Technological Capacity to Secure Underwater Infrastructure:The Case of Ireland

Subsea infrastructure, which includes both data cables and oil and gas pipelines, is truly at the radical frontiers of the state. It is an invisible and silent system traversing the high seas, which traditionally was considered an anarchic domain outside of legislative scope or territorial reach (see for example Slogget, 2013)

Reader Role Models: How Cross-Age Tutoring Can Help Second and Sixth Graders Improve Their Reading Skills

The research question addressed in this capstone is: “How does a reading intervention program at an urban charter school taught by sixth grade students to second grade students, commonly known as cross-age tutoring, affect the reading test scores of both groups?” This action research study examines the practice of cross-age tutoring and details the development of a reading program involving eight sixth grade and eight second grade students in an urban charter school setting. Using a mixed methods design, the results indicated significant growth and improvement for the second grade students, while the sixth grade students showed more mixed results

Comparative grazing behaviour of lactating suckler cows of contrasting genetic merit and genotype

peer-reviewedThe objective of this study was to determine if differences in grazing behaviour exist between lactating suckler cows diverse in genetic merit for the national Irish Replacement index and of two contrasting genotypes. Data from 103 cows: 41 high and 62 low genetic merit, 43 beef and 60 beef x dairy (BDX) cows were available over a single grazing season in 2015. Milk yield, grass dry matter intake (GDMI), cow live weight (BW) and body condition score (BCS) were recorded during the experimental period, with subsequent measures of production efficiency extrapolated. Grazing behaviour data were recorded twice in conjunction with aforementioned measures, using Institute of Grassland and Environmental Research headset behaviour recorders. The effect of genotype and cow genetic merit during mid- and late-lactation on grazing behaviour phenotypes, milk yield, BW, BCS and GDMI were estimated using linear mixed models. Genetic merit had no significant effect on any production parameters investigated, with the exception that low genetic merit had a greater BCS than high genetic merit cows. Beef cows were heavier, had a greater BCS but produced less milk per day than BDX. The BDX cows produced more milk per 100 kg BW and per unit intake and had greater GDMI, intake per bite and rate of GDMI per 100 kg BW than beef cows. High genetic merit cows spent longer grazing and took more bites per day but had a lower rate of GDMI than low genetic merit cows, with the same trend found when expressed per unit of BW. High genetic merit cows spent longer grazing than low genetic merit cows when expressed on a per unit intake basis. Absolute rumination measures were similar across cow genotype and genetic merit. When expressed per unit BW, BDX cows spent longer ruminating per day compared to beef. However, on a per unit intake basis, beef cows ruminated longer and had more mastications than BDX. Intake per bite and rate of intake was positively correlated with GDMI per 100 kg BW. The current study implies that despite large differences in grazing behaviour between cows diverse in genetic merit, few differences were apparent in terms of production efficiency variables extrapolated. Conversely, differences in absolute grazing and ruminating behaviour measurements did not exist between beef cows of contrasting genotype. However, efficiency parameters investigated illustrate that BDX will subsequently convert herbage intake more efficiently to milk production

Survey and analysis of state laws to determine liability of school boards or school funds for student injuries

Thesis (M.A.)--Boston University, 1948. This item was digitized by the Internet Archive

Approximate Bayesian Computation in State Space Models

A new approach to inference in state space models is proposed, based on approximate Bayesian computation (ABC). ABC avoids evaluation of the likelihood function by matching observed summary statistics with statistics computed from data simulated from the true process; exact inference being feasible only if the statistics are sufficient. With finite sample sufficiency unattainable in the state space setting, we seek asymptotic sufficiency via the maximum likelihood estimator (MLE) of the parameters of an auxiliary model. We prove that this auxiliary model-based approach achieves Bayesian consistency, and that - in a precise limiting sense - the proximity to (asymptotic) sufficiency yielded by the MLE is replicated by the score. In multiple parameter settings a separate treatment of scalar parameters, based on integrated likelihood techniques, is advocated as a way of avoiding the curse of dimensionality. Some attention is given to a structure in which the state variable is driven by a continuous time process, with exact inference typically infeasible in this case as a result of intractable transitions. The ABC method is demonstrated using the unscented Kalman filter as a fast and simple way of producing an approximation in this setting, with a stochastic volatility model for financial returns used for illustration