Do You Trust Doctors? Framing and Blame Attribution in Medical News Stories

Honors (Bachelor's)Communication StudiesUniversity of Michiganhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/147400/1/wxiaolei.pd

Isolating the real roots of the piecewise algebraic variety

AbstractThe piecewise algebraic variety, as a set of the common zeros of multivariate splines, is a kind of generalization of the classical algebraic variety. In this paper, we present an algorithm for isolating the zeros of the zero-dimensional piecewise algebraic variety which is primarily based on the interval zeros of univariate interval polynomials. Numerical example illustrates that the proposed algorithm is flexible

Maximum entropy-based modeling of community-level hazard responses for civil infrastructures

Perturbed by natural hazards, community-level infrastructure networks operate like many-body systems, with behaviors emerging from coupling individual component dynamics with group correlations and interactions. It follows that we can borrow methods from statistical physics to study the response of infrastructure systems to natural disasters. This study aims to construct a joint probability distribution model to describe the post-hazard state of infrastructure networks and propose an efficient surrogate model of the joint distribution for large-scale systems. Specifically, we present maximum entropy modeling of the regional impact of natural hazards on civil infrastructures. Provided with the current state of knowledge, the principle of maximum entropy yields the ``most unbiased`` joint distribution model for the performances of infrastructures. In the general form, the model can handle multivariate performance states and higher-order correlations. In a particular yet typical scenario of binary performance state variables with knowledge of their mean and pairwise correlation, the joint distribution reduces to the Ising model in statistical physics. In this context, we propose using a dichotomized Gaussian model as an efficient surrogate for the maximum entropy model, facilitating the application to large systems. Using the proposed method, we investigate the seismic collective behavior of a large-scale road network (with 8,694 nodes and 26,964 links) in San Francisco, showcasing the non-trivial collective behaviors of infrastructure systems

The small finitistic dimensions over commutative rings

Let $R$ be a commutative ring with identity. The small finitistic dimension \fPD(R) of $R$ is defined to be the supremum of projective dimensions of $R$-modules with finite projective resolutions. In this paper, we characterize a ring $R$ with \fPD(R)\leq n using finitely generated semi-regular ideals, tilting modules, cotilting modules of cofinite type or vaguely associated prime ideals. As an application, we obtain that if $R$ is a Noetherian ring, then \fPD(R)= \sup\{\grade(\m,R)|\m\in \Max(R)\} where \grade(\m,R) is the grade of \m on $R$ . We also show that a ring $R$ satisfies \fPD(R)\leq 1 if and only if $R$ is a \DW ring. As applications, we show that the small finitistic dimensions of strong \Prufer\ rings and \LPVDs are at most one. Moreover, for any given $n\in \mathbb{N}$, we obtain examples of total rings of quotients $R$ with \fPD(R)=n