Love, Unsublatable

Love, Unsublatable by May Yan

The Power of Story: Toward Dismantling Racism

The traditional narrative of America is one that upholds Whiteness and reinforces a society built on a system of advantages based on race. The particular blueprint for narration of self and experience that I posit in this project stands in opposition that dominant narrative as I advocate instead for the flourishing of people of color through narration of self. I propose a call to people of color that we counteract and dismantle our racist system by telling our stories. In this project, I explore four theologians from the perspective of storytelling and memory: Father Robert Schreiter, Stephen Crites, Miroslav Volf and Willie James Jennings. Together their works allow us to shape a theology of memory— a theology necessary for the embodied praxis of storytelling. I propose a storytelling model that encompasses three pillars: 1) the articulation of one’s story as told by others, 2) the research one’s story, and 3) the telling of it. This particular model serves as an entry point into race discourse in a racialized society and is therefore vital in forging a new future that respects difference and diversity

Patients without colonoscopic follow-up after abnormal fecal immunochemical tests are often unaware of the abnormal result and report several barriers to colonoscopy.

BackgroundThe fecal immunochemical test (FIT) is the second most commonly used colorectal cancer (CRC) screening modality in the United States; yet, follow-up of abnormal FIT results with diagnostic colonoscopy is underutilized. Our objective was to determine patient-reported barriers to diagnostic colonoscopy following abnormal FIT in an academic healthcare setting.MethodsWe included patients age 50-75 with an abnormal FIT result between 1/1/2015 and 10/31/2017 and no documented follow-up diagnostic colonoscopy. We abstracted demographic data from the electronic health record (EHR). Study personnel conducted telephone surveys with patients to confirm colonoscopy completion and elicit data on notification of FIT results and barriers to colonoscopy. We also provided brief verbal education about diagnostic colonoscopy. We calculated frequencies of demographic data and survey responses and compared survey responses by interest in colonoscopy after education.ResultsWe surveyed 67 patients. Fifty-one were aware of the abnormal FIT result, and a majority learned of the abnormal FIT result by direct communication with providers (19, 37.3%) or EHR messaging (11, 21.6%). Overall, fifty-three patients (79.1%) confirmed lack of colonoscopy, citing provider-related (19, 35.8%), patient-related (16, 30.2%), system-related (1, 1.9%), or multifactorial (17, 32.1%) reasons. Lack of knowledge of FIT result (14, 26.4%) was most common. After brief education, 20 (37.7%) patients requested colonoscopy.ConclusionPatients with an abnormal FIT reported various multi-level barriers to diagnostic colonoscopy after abnormal FIT, including knowledge of FIT results. When provided with brief education, participants expressed interest in diagnostic colonoscopy. Future efforts will evaluate interventions to improve colonoscopy follow-up

Cosmological Information in Weak Lensing Peaks

Recent studies have shown that the number counts of convergence peaks N(kappa) in weak lensing (WL) maps, expected from large forthcoming surveys, can be a useful probe of cosmology. We follow up on this finding, and use a suite of WL convergence maps, obtained from ray-tracing N-body simulations, to study (i) the physical origin of WL peaks with different heights, and (ii) whether the peaks contain information beyond the convergence power spectrum P_ell. In agreement with earlier work, we find that high peaks (with amplitudes >~ 3.5 sigma, where sigma is the r.m.s. of the convergence kappa) are typically dominated by a single massive halo. In contrast, medium-height peaks (~0.5-1.5 sigma) cannot be attributed to a single collapsed dark matter halo, and are instead created by the projection of multiple (typically, 4-8) halos along the line of sight, and by random galaxy shape noise. Nevertheless, these peaks dominate the sensitivity to the cosmological parameters w, sigma_8, and Omega_m. We find that the peak height distribution and its dependence on cosmology differ significantly from predictions in a Gaussian random field. We directly compute the marginalized errors on w, sigma_8, and Omega_m from the N(kappa) + P_ell combination, including redshift tomography with source galaxies at z_s=1 and z_s=2. We find that the N(kappa) + P_ell combination has approximately twice the cosmological sensitivity compared to P_ell alone. These results demonstrate that N(kappa) contains non-Gaussian information complementary to the power spectrum.Comment: 24 pages, 12 figures, 14 tables. Accepted for publication in PRD (version before proofs

Culturally conditioned privacy in online photosharing : a comparison between American and Chinese users of social network sites

Title from PDF of title page (University of Missouri--Columbia, viewed on Nov. 3, 2010).The entire thesis text is included in the research.pdf file; the official abstract appears in the short.pdf file; a non-technical public abstract appears in the public.pdf file.Thesis advisor: Dr. Lee Wilkins.M. A. University of Missouri--Columbia 2010.This research is a cross-cultural examination of how American and Chinese social network site (SNS) users deal with privacy in online photo sharing. It discovers that American subjects share more about private lives and execute less stringent privacy control in photo sharing on Facebook than Chinese subjects on Renren.com. It also discovers that in consistency with the correlation between privacy and social distance as proposed by the social distance theory, American subjects show a higher level of intensity of feeling in Facebook friendship than Chinese subjects in Renren.com friendship. Those differences of online privacy and friendship are not only conditioned by the ingroup-based differences between individualistic American culture and collectivistic Chinese culture, but also attributed to the mediation of social network sites on American culture and Chinese culture.Includes bibliographical reference

Real-Time Fault Classification for Plasma Processes

Plasma process tools, which usually cost several millions of US dollars, are often used in the semiconductor fabrication etching process. If the plasma process is halted due to some process fault, the productivity will be reduced and the cost will increase. In order to maximize the product/wafer yield and tool productivity, a timely and effective fault process detection is required in a plasma reactor. The classification of fault events can help the users to quickly identify fault processes, and thus can save downtime of the plasma tool. In this work, optical emission spectroscopy (OES) is employed as the metrology sensor for in-situ process monitoring. Splitting into twelve different match rates by spectrum bands, the matching rate indicator in our previous work (Yang, R.; Chen, R.S. Sensors 2010, 10, 5703–5723) is used to detect the fault process. Based on the match data, a real-time classification of plasma faults is achieved by a novel method, developed in this study. Experiments were conducted to validate the novel fault classification. From the experimental results, we may conclude that the proposed method is feasible inasmuch that the overall accuracy rate of the classification for fault event shifts is 27 out of 28 or about 96.4% in success

Waist of the sphere for maps to manifolds

We generalize the sphere waist theorem of Gromov and the Borsuk--Ulam type measure partition lemma of Gromov--Memarian for maps to manifolds

Finite-temperature time-dependent variation with multiple Davydov states

The Dirac-Frenkel time-dependent variational approach with Davydov Ans\"atze is a sophisticated, yet efficient technique to obtain an acuurate solution to many-body Schr\"odinger equations for energy and charge transfer dy- namics in molecular aggregates and light-harvesting complexes. We extend this variational approach to finite temperatures dynamics of the spin-boson model by adopting a Monte Carlo importance sampling method. In or- der to demonstrate the applicability of this approach, we compare real-time quantum dynamics of the spin-boson model calculated with that from numerically exact iterative quasiadiabatic propagator path integral (QUAPI) technique. The comparison shows that our variational approach with the single Davydov Ans\"atze is in excellent agreement with the QUAPI method at high temperatures, while the two differ at low temperatures. Accuracy in dynamics calculations employing a multitude of Davydov trial states is found to improve substantially over the single Davydov Ansatz, especially at low temperatures. At a moderate computational cost, our variational approach with the multiple Davydov Ansatz is shown to provide accurate spin-boson dynamics over a wide range of temperatures and bath spectral densities.Comment: 8 pages, 3 figure