Energy Policy: Creating Connected Communities and a Clean Energy Future

Marisa Slaten is the Director of Regulatory Strategy and Services for Pepco Holdings (PHI), an Exelon company. Marisa is responsible for leading the regulatory activity and stakeholder engagement for Delmarva Power & Light in Delaware and Atlantic City Electric Co. in New Jersey. In this role Marisa manages regulatory and compliance filings, testifies as a policy witness, and regularly meets with government officials and industry leaders to discuss energy policies and priority initiatives. Prior to joining PHI, Marisa was the Director of the Division of Clean Energy at the New Jersey Board of Public Utilities and practiced as an attorney for over ten years

The Decline of U.S. Hegemony: Regaining International Consent

This study uses United Nations General Assembly voting data between 1992 and 2005 as well as public opinion surveys from many countries to examine American authority and hegemony in international relations. The data is also used to compare the strength of that authority between the administrations of William Clinton and George W. Bush. In comparing the two time periods, it appears that the U.S. had significant authority over NATO countries in comparison to non-NATO countries during the Clinton years, and that authority declined significantly during the Bush presidency. After establishing these conclusions, potential outcomes of an international system characterized by declining authority are overviewed. Finally, based upon the findings, three options for future American policy are elaborated.No embarg

Doing Sound: An Ethnography of Fidelity, Temporality, and Labor Among Live Sound Engineers

This dissertation ethnographically represents the work of three live sound engineers and the profession of live sound reinforcement engineering in the New York City metropolitan area. In addition to amplifying music to intelligible sound levels, these engineers also amplify music in ways that engage the sonic norms associated with the pertinent musical genres of jazz, rock and music theater. These sonic norms often overdetermine audience members' expectations for sound quality at concerts. In particular, these engineers also work to sonically and visually mask themselves and their equipment. Engineers use the term “transparency” to describe this mode of labor and the relative success of sound reproduction technologies. As a concept within the realm of sound reproduction technologies, transparency describes methods of reproducing sounds without coloring or obscuring the original quality. Transparency closely relates to “fidelity,” a concept that became prominent throughout the late nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries to describe the success of sound reproduction equipment in making the quality of reproduced sound faithful to its original. The ethnography opens by framing the creative labor of live sound engineering through a process of “fidelity.” I argue that fidelity dynamically oscillates as struggle and satisfaction in live sound engineers’ theory of labor and resonates with their phenomenological encounters with sounds and social positions as laborers at concerts. In the first chapter, I describe my own live sound engineering at Jazzmobile in Harlem. The following chapter analyzes the freelance engineering of Randy Taber, who engineers rock and music theater concerts throughout New York City. The third chapter investigates Justin Rathbun’s engineering at Broadway’s Richard Rodgers theater production of “Porgy and Bess.” Much of engineering scholarship privileges the recording studio as the primary site of technological mediation in the production of music. However, this dissertation ethnographically asserts that similar politics and facilities of technological mediation shape live performances of music. In addition, I argue that the shifting temporal conditions of live music production reveal the dynamism of the sound engineers’ personhood on the shop floors of the live music stage

Uncovering the genetic basis of seed amino acid composition in arabidopsis using a multi-omics integrative approach

Seeds are a vital source of protein in the diet of humans and livestock. However, protein composition in the seed is low, comprising about 10 percent of the total composition in the seed. Additionally, protein quality in the seed is poor due to low concentrations of certain essential amino acids (EAA). Since the body is unable to produce EAA, they must be consumed in the diet and failure to do so has detrimental, potentially irreversible, health implications that can result in death. In developing counties where meat and dairy are lacking, protein-energy malnutrition frequently occurs. In contrast, in developing countries large portions of seeds are used in the diet of livestock which must be supplemented with costly synthetic amino acids. Collectively seed amino acid composition of major crops are not sufficient to meet dietary requirements. Protein in the seed is comprised of free amino acids (FAA) and protein bound amino acids (PBAA) which have both been the targets of manipulation in order to create a seed with a more balanced amino acid profile. However, upon perturbations to the proteome, mutant seeds have demonstrated a rebalancing phenomenon where even large alterations to the amino acid composition activate a compensation mechanism that returns amino acid levels to a comparable composition to the wild-type. Although a lot is known about amino acid metabolic pathways, what regulates such rebalancing mechanisms is still unknown. However, despite the tight regulation, natural variation does exist in seed FAA and PBAA across Arabidopsis ecotypes with a unique composition specific to each ecotype; this suggests rebalancing has a genetic basis. Thus, the first step in seed biofortification efforts must be to first increase the fundamental understanding of the genetic basis of both FAA and PBAA composition in the seed. Chapter One of this dissertation gives a more in-depth introduction that elaborates on amino acid composition in the seed, the challenges identified in previous experimentation, and how the content of Chapter Two through Chapter Four builds upon and adds value to the area of seed amino acid research as a whole. Chapter Two focuses on uncovering the genes and biological processes that underly the regulation of free Glutamine which belongs to the Glutamate Family (Arginine, Proline, Glutamine, and Glutamate). Although Glutamine is not an EAA, it is a major nitrogencontaining amino acid that is transported to the seed; thus it's regulatory control is of particular interest. I harness the natural variation of Glutamine in a 360 Arabidopsis diversity panel to uncover key regulatory genes. Later, I validate observations from GWAS using both a quantitative trait locus (QTL) analysis and reverse genetic approaches to identify a unique, seed-specific Glutamine-glucosinolate relationship that alters nitrogen and sulfur homeostasis in the seed in the Arabidopsis 360 population. Such finds were substantial as they link primary and secondary metabolism in the seed. Chapter Three focuses on uncovering the genetic basis underlying PBAA composition in dry Arabidopsis seeds while expanding upon the work completed in Chapter Two. 576 high confidence candidate genes (HCCGs) are found through integration of GWAS using PBAA traits and transcriptomic analysis across seed development of two mutants showing active rebalancing. To reveal the underlying biological process, I further subject the HCCGs to a protein-protein interaction (PPI) network that strongly suggests that ribosomal genes and potentially other translational machinery may be in the heart of PBAA composition homeostasis and the proteomic rebalancing response. Chapter Four addresses the need of a comprehensive tool to efficiently and automatically analyze many biochemical derived-traits in GWAS, while also completing pre and post-GWAS analysis. Here, I present the R tool HAPPI GWAS, describing each step in the pipeline, and giving an example of its implementation. Lastly, Chapter Five reiterates the contributions of this dissertation to the field of seed amino acid research and provides insight into future direction and research projects. The results from this work are vital steps in understanding the complex regulatory mechanisms underlying amino acid composition in the seed which can be used in manipulating the amino acid pools in future translational crop research

Ethnography, Sound Studies and the Black Atlantic

The following discussion between Michael Veal and Whitney Slaten emerged amidst Veal’s presentations for Columbia’s Center for Jazz Studies in the 2015-2016 academic year. Drawing from the current research of Veal and Slaten, as well as the recent work in sound studies, this discussion explores the status of the human in black popular music studies. It begins by tracing the significance of how Veal situates his subjects locally, yet also in dialogue with important centers of black popular music throughout the Atlantic. In the wake of oppressive histories that have associated black musical expression to the permanent objectifications of slavery, the discourse about Fred Moten’s important analysis of Aunt Hester’s scream as the supposed object’s resistance, and sound studies’ new turn to decenter social categories in favor of foregrounding sounds and sonic phenomena as objects, the second section asks the following question: how does posthumanism juxtapose with scholarship on black music? Considering the complexities associated with human and post-human approaches, the final section considers how blackness and labor figure in Slaten’s ethnographic research on professional live sound engineering in New York City

Aging Effects on Perception of Parkinsonian and Normal Geriatric Speech

Parkinson disease (PD) is frequently associated with speech and voice deficits, including changes in phonatory, articulatory, speech intelligibility, and prosodic aspects (Spencer, Sanchez, McAllen, & Weir, 2010). Prior studies have investigated listener perception of speech produced by speakers with PD using structured speech tasks such as word repetitions, sentence readings, and passage readings (i.e., Cheang & Pell, 2004; Dagenais, 2011). However, research has also indicated the need for studies with more naturalistic speech stimuli, including monologues, to determine perceptual abilities of different listener groups. Limited studies have examined perception by different listener groups for monologues produced by individuals with PD. The purpose of this study was to investigate aging effects among different listener groups during perception of monologues produced by individuals with PD and age- and gender-matched neurologically normal speakers (NS). The study included three listener groups (younger, middle-aged, older-aged adults). Speakers included five individuals with PD and five NS. All speakers produced a short monologue on a topic of interest. The three listener groups listened to the recorded monologues and completed a visual analog scale (VAS) to rate seven speech variables (including pitch, pitch variability, loudness, speech rate, pauses, understandability, and perception of effort) for the two speaker groups. Among the seven variables, results indicated that listener groups rated understandability and perception of effort significantly differently for individuals with PD and NS. All three listener groups rated the understandability for speakers with PD to be significantly lower than NS. However, the listener groups did not have any significantly different ratings for the remaining five variables including pitch, loudness, and speech rate. In addition, when the listener groups were compared amongst themselves, there were no significant aging effects among the groups for perception of monologues. Findings from the study provide evidence for similar perception among different aged normal listener groups for perception of monologues by individuals with PD and neurologically normal speakers.Communication Sciences & Disorder