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A Fortress within a Modern City: What is St. George?
(2024-05) Sajo, Helen
Baton Rouge, Louisiana is home to over 400,000 residents, of which 80,000 might become residents of a new city: St. George. In October 2019, a majority voted to incorporate their portion of East Baton Rouge Parish into a city which would become the richest and whitest city in Louisiana. The organizers of the incorporation say it was because of reasons such as the need for a better public school system and for financial sovereignty from the city of Baton Rouge, but it goes deeper than that. With a survey and personal interviews, this research suggests that residents were misled about the creation of this new city, as well as how much of an impact it would have on all of the surrounding areas. Residents were unaware of how they would receive city services, and how long it would take to get the new public schools operational. While the creation of this city could have happened and was legal, a lawsuit set it back and the incorporation has been denied on multiple technicalities. They are currently awaiting a decision from the Louisiana Supreme Court.
Deconstructing Gender and Media: A Mixed Methods Study with U.S. Early Adolescents
(2024) Zhou, Cecilia Yuxi; Scharrer, Erica; Durrani, Alina
This mixed methods study investigates conceptions of gender both in and outside of the media among a sample of 11- and 12-year-olds. Data from a quantitative survey and qualitative writing responses were collected and analyzed from 54 sixth graders at a U.S public elementary school. Results show that the majority held inclusive views of gender, indicating a recognition of gender inequities in media and society and a desire to challenge traditional gender norms. However, perhaps due to gender-typed content, stronger perceptions of the similarity of the people appearing in YouTube videos, commercials, video games, music videos, and movies to the self were associated with more stereotypical views about gender roles and norms in a weak but statistically significant correlation. This may suggest that accepting media representations as accurately reflecting oneself can still be linked to endorsing more traditional roles and norms, even within a sample with generally quite open conceptions of gender.
The Political Economy of Pragmatic Paranoia: The Strange Case of Pakistan
(2024) Razmi, Arslan
Pakistan's political economy has been characterized by some interesting and arguably unique features in recent decades. The combination of two stands out, in particular: (1) lifetime uncertainty for elected governments, and (2) a high degree of certainty that, due to reasons that are largely extraneous to popularity and policy performance, the incumbent party will not form the government in the next term. This paper argues, employing modified formal frameworks developed for other con- texts, that these features go a significant way in explaining why the economy has experienced dramatic cyclical fluctuations in internal and external macroeconomic indicators, especially official foreign exchange reserve stocks. In addition, the analysis helps explain the consistent underinvestment in tax revenue-generation capacity. The existing "partisan" and "opportunistic" varieties of political business cycle models do not satisfactorily capture these features. The analysis, thus, extends this literature in new directions.
NARRATIVES IN THE WRITINGS OF ENSLAVED BLACK WOMEN: THE CASE OF THE NEW KINGDOM OF GRANADA AND THE VICEROYALTY OF NEW GRANADA DURING THE 17TH AND 18TH CENTURIES
(2024-05) Abello Hurtado, Maria Ximena
This dissertation explores Black South American women and girls' epistolary tradition. Drawing on Black Feminist methodologies and decolonial theoretical frameworks/theoretical traditions, I analyze the intersections of race, class, gender, and sexuality and their effects on the creation, preservation, and analyses of Black women's early written production. Specifically, I center my analysis on bodies of literature composed of letters written by enslaved people alongside legal documents caused by Spanish colonial authorities. I explore the records of an enslaved Black woman produced in the context of lawsuits, legal battles, and cases of emancipation in the New Kingdom of Granada and the Viceroyalty of New Granada during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. I argue that the study of these often-overlooked documents contributes to the current conversations on the future of African studies, Black feminisms, Black women's literary production, Black anticolonial feminisms, and Black historiographies by shedding light on early written documents by enslaved women. This work highlights the importance of exploring these extensive bodies of literature and continuing to advance methodologies for analyzing this material by reading against the grain of the Trans-Atlantic colonial archives.
A Scalable Wear Leveling Technique for Phase Change Memory
(2024) Xu, Wang; Koren, Israel
Phase Change Memory (PCM), one of the recently proposed non-volatile memory technologies, has been suffering from low write endurance. For example, a single-layer PCM cell could only be written approximately 108. This limits the lifetime of a PCM-based memory to a few days rather than years when memory-intensive applications are running. Wear leveling techniques have been proposed to improve the write endurance of a PCM. Among those techniques, the region-based start-gap (RBSG) scheme is widely cited as achieving the highest lifetime. Based on our experiments, RBSG can achieve 97% of the ideal lifetime, but only for relatively small memory sizes (e.g., 8–32GB). As the memory size goes up, RBSG becomes less effective and its expected percentage of the ideal lifetime reduces to less than 57% for a 2TB PCM. In this article, we propose a table-based wear leveling scheme called block grouping to enhance the write endurance of a PCM with a negligible overhead. Our research results show that with a proper configuration and adoption of partial writes (writing back only 64B subblocks instead of a whole row to the PCM arrays) and internal row shift (shifting the subblocks in a row periodically so no subblock in a row will be written repeatedly), the proposed block grouping scheme could achieve 95% of the ideal lifetime on average for the Rodinia, NPB, and SPEC benchmarks with less than 1.74% performance overhead and up to 0.18% hardware overhead. Moreover, our scheme is scalable and achieves the same percentage of ideal lifetime for PCM of size from 8GB to 2TB. We also show that the proposed scheme can better tolerate memory write attacks than WoLFRaM (Wear Leveling and Fault Tolerance for Resistive Memories) and RBSG for a PCM of size 32GB or higher. Finally, we integrate an error-correcting pointer technique into our proposed block grouping scheme to make the PCM fault tolerant against hard errors.

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