An Examination of Government Involvement in Property & Casualty Insurance

For decades, both state and federal governments have taken a larger role in the property and casualty market. The National Flood Insurance Plan directly writes policies. In contrast, the California Fair Access to Insurance Requirement establishes a last-resort insurance pool for those unable to find certain types of coverage through conventional means. Finally, the Terrorism Risk Insurance Act establishes a federal reinsurance backstop in the event of a severe terror loss. While each program seeks to expand property and casualty coverage, some have been more successful than others. This thesis examines the efficacy of each program and provides reform suggestions

High Intensity Drug Trafficking Areas and small/community banks in rural areas.

Drug trafficking is on the rise in America. Drug trafficking brings money laundering, and banks have to combat this with Anti-Money laundering (AML) policies from the Bank Secrecy act. This is combated by the High-Intensity-Drug-Trafficking Area (HIDTA) designation. The designation aims at providing support to local, state, and federal law enforcement to combat drug trafficking in these counties. HIDTA and banks are not connected. Rather I use the HIDTA designation as a proxy to clearly identify counties that have drug trafficking. I specifically focused on small and community banks in rural areas. Small and community banks are disproportionately affected by AML policies compared to larger banks due to larger banks being able to employ economies of scale. Larger banks are able to spread the compliance costs over their network of branches, while a small bank might only have a couple of branches across their local areas. To find this, I found counties based on the census definition of mostly rural, mostly urban, and completely rural. I then used bank deposit information as a proxy for financial health of the bank. I ran regressions, and found that there is a statistical significance that HIDTA does hurt bank deposits in a county. I found that these HIDTA designation hurts bank deposits more in completely rural areas compared to mostly rural and urban counties. Most importantly, I found that when a county started as HIDTA and then was later removed as a HIDTA county, signaling there was no need for HIDTA and it was successful at reducing drug trafficking in the area, median deposits increased. This supports the hypothesis that the elimination of HIDTA designation will positively influence banking behavior

Comparing Brief Acceptance and Control-Based Interventions: Evaluating Public Speaking Performance in Socially-Anxious Individuals

Social anxiety disorder is one of the most prevalent psychological disorders in our society today. Although Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) is considered a gold standard for the treatment of anxiety disorders, some individuals do not respond to CBT, and other approaches to treatment continue to be investigated. One alternative approach is Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), which has been used successfully to treat social anxiety, and has also tentatively been shown to be effective for increasing public speaking performance. The current study compared the effects of brief acceptance- and cognitive-control-based intervention protocols on public speaking performance in socially-anxious college students who took part in a lab-based public speaking task. Participants prepared and gave a 5-minute impromptu speech, and outcome data were collected concerning anxiety, avoidance, and distress. Results indicated that participants in the ACT and CBT conditions did not significantly differ in terms of public speaking performance, nor did they display a significant reduction in anxiety following the speech. Participants in the ACT condition did report significantly lower levels of experiential avoidance post-speech, indicating that the acceptance-based intervention was working via the proposed mechanism of action. These findings promote the feasibility and use of brief interventions, and shed light on the importance of developing techniques to increase public speaking performance

What It Means to Have Meaning: AI’s Poetic Appropriation of the Human Imagination

This thesis is an exploration of human imagination and creativity as it pertains to poetry. With the rise of “intelligent” machines, it is the duty of scholars, thinkers, philosophers, and artists to gauge the ethics of using robots to create art, create information, and create in general. With that in mind, this thesis aims to distinguish the definitions of natural and artificial intelligence. This distinction is at the heart of what makes poetry inherently human. AI poses a threat to poetry and the act of artistic expression. Additionally, AI poses a threat to the human imagination. The aim of the critical paper is to expose these truths regarding artificial intelligence. Thus, reclaiming poetry and the act of creativity. The creative manuscript, Random Access Memories, is an experiment to see if the reader can tell what is human and what is not, and a showcase of just how far AI has come to stealing what is inherently human

History as Community-Based Research and the Pedagogy of Discovery: Teaching Racial Inequality, Documenting Local History, and Building Links Between Students and Communities in Mississippi and Tennessee

In this article we describe the process of implementing a community-based research project that linked student learning with documenting elements of local histories surrounding the civil rights movement in Mississippi and Tennessee. We show that developing a dialogue among community members, ourselves, and our students worked to democratize the research project, produce strong support among the community members, and contribute to an improved understanding of racial inequality for our students. We rely on our accounts of the process, student journals, and oral histories compiled during the research. Our findings show that there are considerable opportunities for community-based research around documenting and sharing key memories and that these can be realized even when the priorities between researchers and community members do not align. Our historically-oriented fieldwork, research, and findings serve to link service-learning to community-based research