Seeing Me in the Story: Representation of Multiracial Characters in Multimedia

In 2015, I discovered Saga, a graphic novel series that chronicles a science fiction story of war, family, and forbidden love. This series resonated with me because it is the first piece of pop culture that I invested in with a leading character whose racial identity is similar to my own. I discovered three multiracial characters in different forms of media set within the United States: Lincoln Clay from the videogame Mafia III, Lara Jean Covey from the movie To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before, and Miles Morales from Ultimate Comics: Spider-Man. As both a student affairs professional and a multiracial individual, I use current literature on the multiracial experience in the United States and multiracial identity development theories from my field as a lens to analyze these characters and how I see aspects of my identity in their stories

Arguing against obligatory feature inheritance: Evidence from French transitive participle agreement

In this article, we accept the view that the relevant type of case/agreement features originate on phase heads, but argue against a strong view of the Percolation Hypothesis on which uninterpretable features obligatorily percolate down from a phase head onto a selected head: on the contrary, we maintain that there are structures in which uninterpretable case/agreement features remain on the phase head throughout the derivation. The main empirical evidence we adduce in support of our claim comes from a novel analysis of French past participle agreement which builds on earlier work by Radford and Vincent (2007) and Vincent (2007). In section 2, we briefly characterise French past participle agreement, and outline the key assumptions which our analysis makes. We show how our analysis handles past participle agreement with a local direct object in section 3, and go on to show how it correctly specifies when (and why) agreement can take place with the subject of an embedded infinitive complement in section 4. In section 5, we present further empirical evidence against the Percolation Hypothesis from a range of independent phenomena, and highlight some theoretical inadequacies of the hypothesis, as well as reconsidering the motivation for feature percolation. Finally, in section 6 we summarize our overall conclusions

On past participle agreement in transitive clauses in French

This paper provides a Minimalist analysis of past participle agreement in French in transitive clauses. Our account posits that the head v of vP in such structures carries an (accusativeassigning) structural case feature which may apply (with or without concomitant agreement) to case-mark a clause-mate object, the subject of a defective complement clause, or an intermediate copy of a preposed subject in spec-CP. In structures where a goal is extracted from vP (e.g. via wh-movement) v also carries an edge feature, and may also carry a specificity feature and a set of (number and gender) agreement features. We show how these assumptions account for agreement of a participle with a preposed specific clausemate object or defective-clause subject, and for the absence of agreement with an embedded object, with the complement of an impersonal verb, and with the subject of an embedded (finite or nonfinite) CP complement. We also argue that the absence of agreement marking (in expected contexts) on the participles faitmade and laissélet in infinitive structures is essentially viral in nature. Finally, we claim that obligatory participle agreement with reflexive and reciprocal objects arises because the derivation of reflexives involves A-movement and concomitant agreement

A View Toward Sound Policy Initiatives Regarding Agricultural Alternative Fuels

Scientific understanding regarding causes of climate change is maturing. Earlier indications that atmospheric CO2 is the primary cause have been challenged by recent studies. Evidence against anthropogenic global warming is mounting. Subsidized alternative fuel initiatives may run out of support once political opinion aligns with scientific realities. First steps toward policy statements within professional organizations that reflect our current understanding of forces driving climate change are called for. We as farm or timberland managers, investors, lenders, appraisers or consultants in these fields should update our understanding. Agriculture’s potential contribution toward cost effective alternative fuel sources and energy independence is discussed.Environmental Economics and Policy,

Curvature Spectra and Nongaussianities in the Roulette Inflation Model

Using the gradient expansion method of Rigopoulos, Shellard and van Tent which treats cosmological perturbations as gradients on top of a homogeneous and isotropic FRW background, we study the production of nongaussianities in the roulette model of inflation. Investigating a number of trajectories within this two-field model of inflation, we find that while the superhorizon influence of the isocurvature modes on the curvature bispectrum produces nonzero contribution to f_NL, the effect is negligible next to the standard inflationary prediction |f_NL| ~ n_s - 1. This is the case in both the squeezed and equilateral configurations of the bispectrum, although the former is slightly larger in the trajectories under consideration.Comment: 23 pages, 6 figures, 3 tables, 1 appendix; Added references, slightly extended section

Observable Graphs

An edge-colored directed graph is \emph{observable} if an agent that moves along its edges is able to determine his position in the graph after a sufficiently long observation of the edge colors. When the agent is able to determine his position only from time to time, the graph is said to be \emph{partly observable}. Observability in graphs is desirable in situations where autonomous agents are moving on a network and one wants to localize them (or the agent wants to localize himself) with limited information. In this paper, we completely characterize observable and partly observable graphs and show how these concepts relate to observable discrete event systems and to local automata. Based on these characterizations, we provide polynomial time algorithms to decide observability, to decide partial observability, and to compute the minimal number of observations necessary for finding the position of an agent. In particular we prove that in the worst case this minimal number of observations increases quadratically with the number of nodes in the graph. From this it follows that it may be necessary for an agent to pass through the same node several times before he is finally able to determine his position in the graph. We then consider the more difficult question of assigning colors to a graph so as to make it observable and we prove that two different versions of this problem are NP-complete.Comment: 15 pages, 8 figure

On the Finiteness Property for Rational Matrices

We analyze the periodicity of optimal long products of matrices. A set of matrices is said to have the finiteness property if the maximal rate of growth of long products of matrices taken from the set can be obtained by a periodic product. It was conjectured a decade ago that all finite sets of real matrices have the finiteness property. This conjecture, known as the ``finiteness conjecture", is now known to be false but no explicit counterexample to the conjecture is available and in particular it is unclear if a counterexample is possible whose matrices have rational or binary entries. In this paper, we prove that finite sets of nonnegative rational matrices have the finiteness property if and only if \emph{pairs} of \emph{binary} matrices do. We also show that all {pairs} of $2 \times 2$ binary matrices have the finiteness property. These results have direct implications for the stability problem for sets of matrices. Stability is algorithmically decidable for sets of matrices that have the finiteness property and so it follows from our results that if all pairs of binary matrices have the finiteness property then stability is decidable for sets of nonnegative rational matrices. This would be in sharp contrast with the fact that the related problem of boundedness is known to be undecidable for sets of nonnegative rational matrices.Comment: 12 pages, 1 figur