North Korea’s Nuclear Program and Negotiation: How Nuclear Negotiation during the Clinton Years Produced Lessons for Current International Relations

North Korea’s road of survival began in the aftermath of World War II, when the United States and the Soviet Union sparred over rival ideologies. Ultimately, Korea split into a free south and an authoritarian north. Over seventy years later, North Korea remains a bastion of communism. Nuclear weaponry is a factor behind North Korea’s survival, and the history of their program can offer insight for American policy makers today. This paper offers a history of North Korea’s nuclear weapons program during the Clinton presidency, along with recommendations for present day policy makers. Without an understanding of history decision-makers tend to make mistakes and act rashly. It is imperative America understands its diplomatic issues with North Korea, and provide diplomatic, strategic, and military solutions for future negotiations

Tattoos in the Workplace

Test the hypothesis that there is a stigma attached to individuals with tattoos in the workplace

Telling the Transnational Self: Shifting Identities in the Voyages of Pierre- Esprit Radisson

Between his birth, most likely in Paris, in 1636, and his death, in London, in 1710, Pierre-Esprit Radisson led a vagabond life. His youth was spent in the colonies of New France and among the neighboring Native American communities. At roughly fifteen years of age he was taken captive by the Iroquois and adopted into a Mohawk family. After his return to New France, Radisson made good use of his knowledge of Native American customs, traveling west into Huronia with his brother-in-law and trading for furs. After a falling-out with the governor of New France, however, Radisson and his brother-in-law ended up in England, where Radisson made a manuscript record of their voyages. Radisson then played a key role in the founding of the Hudson's Bay Company, which, from 1670 onwards, established the English as an important force in the fur trade. Radisson, however, returned to the service of the French king, Louis XIV, briefly in the 1680s, in large part because of anti-French sentiment in the Company. And yet, Radisson's family ties in England made it difficult for him to find the kind of employment he had hoped for in France, and so he returned again to England, where he remained until his death. This essay examines his life and writings in the context of changing concepts of identity and authorship in the seventeenth century

Coastal Cities: How Efficacious are Climate Change Policies in Urban Settings? Examining New York City:

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Social Studies of Bard College

Bayesian Population Genomic Inference of Crossing Over and Gene Conversion

Meiotic recombination is a fundamental cellular mechanism in sexually reproducing organisms and its different forms, crossing over and gene conversion both play an important role in shaping genetic variation in populations. Here, we describe a coalescent-based full-likelihood Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) method for jointly estimating the crossing-over, gene-conversion, and mean tract length parameters from population genomic data under a Bayesian framework. Although computationally more expensive than methods that use approximate likelihoods, the relative efficiency of our method is expected to be optimal in theory. Furthermore, it is also possible to obtain a posterior sample of genealogies for the data using this method. We first check the performance of the new method on simulated data and verify its correctness. We also extend the method for inference under models with variable gene-conversion and crossing-over rates and demonstrate its ability to identify recombination hotspots. Then, we apply the method to two empirical data sets that were sequenced in the telomeric regions of the X chromosome of Drosophila melanogaster. Our results indicate that gene conversion occurs more frequently than crossing over in the su-w and su-s gene sequences while the local rates of crossing over as inferred by our program are not low. The mean tract lengths for gene-conversion events are estimated to be ∼70 bp and 430 bp, respectively, for these data sets. Finally, we discuss ideas and optimizations for reducing the execution time of our algorithm