The system of subjectivity: Societal systems and literary pardigms

Patterns aid in deepening humanity\u27s understanding of the world and what is cultivated within it. Patterns emerge in interactive disciplines such as language, literature, science, visual arts, and even mathematics. The existence of patterns assists the human need to understand a complicated world. Beyond simply seeing patterns as they are presented, I am interested in exploring how these patterns manifest into paradigmatic structures that affect the way in which society. Particularly, I am interested in the socialized perceptions of literature, and the role that systems plays in their interaction and development. This thesis project: 1) introduces the fundamentals of systems theory; 2) explores systems theory as it pertains directly to literary studies; 3) specifies properties of systems theory within literary parameters; 3) and identify how literature operates as an active network of systemic information. This project, in essence, takes sociological aspects of systems theory and demonstrates how those aspects apply to literature as both an art form and as a conduit of active cultural interaction. I hypothesize that literary patterns emerge through such variables as interaction, censorship, circulation, or preservation. A few tertiary influences of literary paradigms are also explored, including the industrialization of publication, civil rights advocacy, and public accessibility to literature. The fundamental objective is to uncover how societal influences impede or cater to literary formulae by evaluating observations made by systems theorists and applying their methodologies to a literary discussion. My findings show that incongruities within systems of literature are not anomalies disproving the possibility of universalism; rather, they are incongruities that represent fledglings of newly discovered systems which may someday manifest into global schemas after extensive interaction has induced collective familiarity

The Risks of Outsourcing Security: Foreign Security Forces in United States National Security Policy

This study combines insights from international relations, diplomatic history, and civil-military relations to improve our understanding of the tenuous arrangement between the United States and its foreign military proxies. For over a century, the U.S. has armed and trained these proxies to assume responsibilities that its own military might otherwise have to bear. But throughout that time, critics have doubted whether the U.S. could or should delegate sensitive security responsibilities to dubious foreign soldiers. Such doubt highlights an international analog to the principal-agent problem normally associated with domestic civil-military relations. I examine why this international principal-agent problem arose, how it has evolved over the past century, and how this evolution has shifted the U.S.\u27s approach to bringing its foreign agents in line with its strategic objectives. From extensive archival research, I find that variation in this approach stems from changes in how the U.S., as the principal, has understood and characterized its security agents. To make sense of this finding, I advance constructivist principal-agent theory. This theory 1) reveals how the principal\u27s evolving perception of its agent defines different bases of the principal-agent problem and 2) shows how each of these bases specifies particular policies--from among all those available--for mitigating that problem

An Inflationary Fixed Point Operator in XQuery

We introduce a controlled form of recursion in XQuery, inflationary fixed points, familiar in the context of relational databases. This imposes restrictions on the expressible types of recursion, but we show that inflationary fixed points nevertheless are sufficiently versatile to capture a wide range of interesting use cases, including the semantics of Regular XPath and its core transitive closure construct. While the optimization of general user-defined recursive functions in XQuery appears elusive, we will describe how inflationary fixed points can be efficiently evaluated, provided that the recursive XQuery expressions exhibit a distributivity property. We show how distributivity can be assessed both, syntactically and algebraically, and provide experimental evidence that XQuery processors can substantially benefit during inflationary fixed point evaluation.Comment: 11 pages, 10 figures, 2 table

Regulation of NOXO1 Activity through Reversible Interactions with p22phox and NOXA1

Reactive oxygen species (ROS) have been known for a long time to play important roles in host defense against microbial infections. In addition, it has become apparent that they also perform regulatory roles in signal transduction and cell proliferation. The source of these chemicals are members of the NOX family of NADPH oxidases that are found in a variety of tissues. NOX1, an NADPH oxidase homologue that is most abundantly expressed in colon epithelial cells, requires the regulatory subunits NOXO1 (NOX organizing protein 1) and NOXA1 (NOX activating protein 1), as well as the flavocytochrome component p22phox for maximal activity. Unlike NOX2, the phagocytic NADPH oxidase whose activity is tightly repressed in the resting state, NOX1 produces superoxide constitutively at low levels. These levels can be further increased in a stimulus-dependent manner, yet the molecular details regulating this activity are not fully understood. Here we present the first quantitative characterization of the interactions made between the cytosolic regulators NOXO1 and NOXA1 and membrane-bound p22phox. Using isothermal titration calorimetry we show that the isolated tandem SH3 domains of NOXO1 bind to p22phox with high affinity, most likely adopting a superSH3 domain conformation. In contrast, complex formation is severely inhibited in the presence of the C-terminal tail of NOXO1, suggesting that this region competes for binding to p22phox and thereby contributes to the regulation of superoxide production. Furthermore, we provide data indicating that the molecular details of the interaction between NOXO1 and NOXA1 is significantly different from that between the homologous proteins of the phagocytic oxidase, suggesting that there are important functional differences between the two systems. Taken together, this study provides clear evidence that the assembly of the NOX1 oxidase complex can be regulated through reversible protein-protein interactions

Pathfinder: XQuery - The Relational Way

Relational query processors are probably the best understood (as well as the best engineered) query engines available today. Although carefully tuned to process instances of the relational model (tables of tuples), these processors can also provide a foundation for the evaluation of "alien" (non-relational) query languages: if a relational encoding of the alien data model and its associated query language is given, the RDBMS may act like a special-purpose processor for the new language

MonetDB/XQuery: a fast XQuery processor powered by a relational engine

Relational XQuery systems try to re-use mature relational data management infrastructures to create fast and scalable XML database technology. This paper describes the main features, key contributions, and lessons learned while implementing such a system. Its architecture consists of (i) a range-based encoding of XML documents into relational tables, (ii) a compilation technique that translates XQuery into a basic relational algebra, (iii) a restricted (order) property-aware peephole relational query optimization strategy, and (iv) a mapping from XML update statements into relational updates. Thus, this system implements all essential XML database functionalities (rather than a single feature) such that we can learn from the full consequences of our architectural decisions. While implementing this system, we had to extend the state-of-the-art with a number of new technical contributions, such as loop-lifted staircase join and efficient relational query evaluation strategies for XQuery theta-joins with existential semantics. These contributions as well as the architectural lessons learned are also deemed valuable for other relational back-end engines. The performance and scalability of the resulting system is evaluated on the XMark benchmark up to data sizes of 11GB. The performance section also provides an extensive benchmark comparison of all major XMark results published previously, which confirm that the goal of purely relational XQuery processing, namely speed and scalability, was met