Sam Shephard's theatre of fragmentation : a performance theory

Cotton, Jerry Duvan U. M. I. 1983 국내박사

Symplectic Floer homology of area-preserving surface diffeomorphisms and sharp fixed point bounds

Cotton-Clay, Andrew Walker University of California, Berkeley 2009 해외박사(DDOD)

The symplectic Floer homology HF*(&phis;) of a symplectomorphism &phis; : Sigma → Sigma encodes data about the fixed points of &phis; using counts of holomorphic cylinders in R x M&phis;, where M &phis; is the mapping torus of &phis;. We give an algorithm to compute HF*(&phis;) for &phis; a surface symplectomorphism in a pseudo-Anosov or reducible mapping class, completing the computation of Seidel's HF*( h) for h any orientation-preserving mapping class. Given a closed, oriented surface Sigma, possibly with boundary, and a mapping class g ∈ pi0(Diff+(Sigma, ∂Sigma)), we obtain a sharp lower bound on the number of fixed points of a surface symplectomorphism (i.e. area-preserving map) in the given mapping class, generalizing the Poincare-Birkhoff fixed point theorem. This bound often exceeds that for non-area-preserving maps. These bounds come from Floer homology computations with certain twisted coefficients and a new method for obtaining fixed point bounds on entire symplectic mapping classes on monotone symplectic manifolds from such computations.

High level ab initio structural and spectroscopic studies of interstellar ion-molecule complexes and interstellar triatomic molecules

Cotton, C. Eric Purdue University 2013 해외박사(DDOD)

Ion molecule complexes are considered possible novel intermediates in the molecular complexification of the interstellar medium. This study reports the results of calculations on the CO, CS, PN, HCN, and HNC molecules and the HCO+, HCS+, HPN+, and HNCH+ ions and their ion-molecule complexes, CO-HCO +, SC-HCS+, and PN-HNP+, HCN-HCNH +, HNC-HCNH+, and HCN-HNCH+. Results from calculations on the triatomic molecules HNSx, HSN x, HPSx, and HNSx (x = -1, 0 , +1) and their low lying electronic excited states are reported. Binging energies of the complexes are found to be significant, implying that these complexes may be observable. It is also found that the interaction of HNC with HNCH+ leads to a novel barrierless isomerization pathway for HNC to HCN. Structural and spectroscopic results from the highly correlated CCSD(T)/aug-cc-pV(6+d)Z and the explicitly correlated CCSD(T)-F12/VQZ-F12 calculations are within 1% when compared to available experimental values. Essential structural and spectroscopic properties for ions and molecules as well as ion-molecule complex are reported. This study provides evidence of novel intermediates and triatomic molecules that can be included in the molecular pathways that constitute the chemical models describing molecular complexification in the interstellar medium.

An analytic approach to Ornstein-Uhlenbeck processes with fluctuating parameters and applications in the modeling of fixed income securities

Cotton, Peter Douglas Stanford University 2001 해외박사(DDOD)

We generalize the Vasicek model for bond prices, in which the instantaneous rate of interest follows an Ornstein-Uhlenbeck process with positive mean, to accommodate randomly fluctuating mean and volatility. Fluctuations are introduced by allowing the Ornstein-Uhlenbeck parameters governing the long run mean and instantaneous variance of this primary interest rate process to depend on a secondary mean reverting stochastic process. The time scale over which oscillations in the secondary process occur is assumed to be short compared with the longer mean reversion time of the primary process and this separation of time scales is exploited in our asymptotic approach to the solution of certain partial differential equations relevant to pricing and estimation. Both continuous and discretely valued secondary stochastic processes are treated. The former gives rise to a family of stochastic volatility models for which we supply explicit formulas correcting the original Vasicek model—the corrections being parsimonious and robust to the exact specification of volatility process. The latter finds interpretation in the regime switching literature and here too, for the first time in this context, accurate closed form bond prices are derived. The domain of applicability of our results, bolstered by numerical tests of the pricing formulas, is discussed with particular emphasis placed on the modeling of default intensities and credit derivatives. We supply evidence for bimodality and predictability in US corporate spreads consistent with regime switches, and evidence of rapid fluctuations in US short term interest rates consistent with our treatment of stochastic volatility.

The experiences in a jail diversion program of women clients who have a severe and persistent mental illness and a history of substance abuse

Cotton, Samuel Leslie Columbia University 2002 해외박사(DDOD)

<italic>Objective</italic>. Explore the experiences of 20 women in a jail diversion and discharge program who have a severe and persistent mental illness and a history of substance abuse. The women's ages ranged from 25 to 57, with a median age of 41. The group was composed of one Caucasian, six Hispanics and 13 African Americans. The author explores the lives of the women and the structural and behavioral challenges facing the women as they attempt to reenter society. The goal of this research was to examine the meanings that the women attached to the diversion experience, their strategies and the consequences of those strategies. <italic>Methods</italic>. Twenty individual interviews and two focus groups were conducted to create a data source from which concepts were extracted, connected by statements of relationship and woven into a theoretical framework utilizing “Grounded Theory” methodology. <italic>Results</italic>. Development of the “Theoretical Model of a Coercive Continuum.” The model depicts the strategies and consequences of mentally ill women who have been subject to the effects of a continuum of coercive and institutional forces. <italic>Conclusion</italic>. Throughout childhood, incarceration and “treatment” in mental health facilities, the women in the study continued to learn the lessons of powerlessness, helplessness and lack of autonomy. The result is that the women will leave the last stage of society's corrective action-mental health treatment still in a state of institutionalization.

Characterizing Audio Events for Video Soundtrack Analysis

Cotton, Courtenay V Columbia University 2013 해외박사(DDOD)

There is an entire emerging ecosystem of amateur video recordings on the internet today, in addition to the abundance of more professionally produced content. The ability to automatically scan and evaluate the content of these recordings would be very useful for search and indexing, especially as amateur content tends to be more poorly labeled and tagged than professional content. Although the visual content is often considered to be of primary importance, the audio modality contains rich information which may be very helpful in the context of video search and understanding. Any technology that could help to interpret video soundtrack data would also be applicable in a number of other scenarios, such as mobile device audio awareness, surveillance, and robotics. In this thesis we approach the problem of extracting information from these kinds of unconstrained audio recordings. Specifically we focus on techniques for characterizing discrete audio events within the soundtrack (e.g. a dog bark or door slam), since we expect events to be particularly informative about content. Our task is made more complicated by the extremely variable recording quality and noise present in this type of audio. Initially we explore the idea of using the matching pursuit algorithm to decompose and isolate components of audio events. Using these components we develop an approach for non-exact (approximate) fingerprinting as a way to search audio data for similar recurring events. We demonstrate a proof of concept for this idea. Subsequently we extend the use of matching pursuit to build an actual audio fingerprinting system, with the goal of identifying simultaneously recorded amateur videos (i.e. videos taken in the same place at the same time by different people, which contain overlapping audio). Automatic discovery of these simultaneous recordings is one particularly interesting facet of general video indexing. We evaluate this fingerprinting system on a database of 733 internet videos. Next we return to searching for features to directly characterize soundtrack events. We develop a system to detect transient sounds and represent audio clips as a histogram of the transients it contains. We use this representation for video classification over a database of 1873 internet videos. When we combine these features with a spectral feature baseline system we achieve a relative improvement of 7.5% in mean average precision over the baseline. In another attempt to devise features to better describe and compare events, we investigate decomposing audio using a convolutional form of non-negative matrix factorization, resulting in event-like spectro-temporal patches. We use the resulting representation to build an event detection system that is more robust to additive noise than a comparative baseline system. Lastly we investigate a promising feature representation that has been used by others previously to describe event-like sound effect clips. These features derive from an auditory model and are meant to capture fine time structure in sound events. We compare these features and a related but simpler feature set on the task of video classification over 9317 internet videos. We find that combinations of these features with baseline spectral features produce a significant improvement in mean average precision over the baseline.

From Test Tube to YouTube: Public Displays of DNA Ancestry Tests Results and the Performance of Race in America

Cotton, Nicole-Marie University of California, Berkeley ProQuest Disser 2022 해외박사(DDOD)

The consumer DNA ancestry testing industry was estimated to have served two million customers in 2015 (Nelson, 2016). DNA ancestry testing is permeating media outlets and proliferating in forms of social media and popular culture. Viewers see performances of genetic ancestry test results on news programs, talk shows, educational programming, and social media sites. Given how ubiquitous DNA ancestry testing is in American households, and how often test results are being shared on social media sites such as YouTube, I argue that we can use DNA test reveals to ascertain the way race is viewed, performed, and negotiated. My research asks, what do the social media performances of DNA Ancestry tests tell us about how test takers see race and ethnicity? Do test-takers change their identity affiliations or the ways they view themselves after reading the results? If so, do test-takers rely more on the genetic component of identity or are there other criteria that have more weight? The performative, dramatic nature of genetic results being read in front of an audience means we can use these reveals to understand what people consider the appropriate criteria to belong to an ethnic or racial group, and to see what conditions cause people to change identity or reject the test results.

Low Inflation: Potential Causes, Effects and Solutions

Cotton, Christopher David Columbia University ProQuest Dissertations & These 2019 해외박사(DDOD)

My dissertation focuses upon low inflation. Many developed countries, especially Japan and the Eurozone, have recently experienced prolonged periods of below-target inflation. This has been blamed for many economic ills including worsening the Great Recession and generating a slow recovery, making monetary policy ineffective and leading to lower labor market flexibility. I study what has caused low inflation, its potential effects and how it could be prevented. In Chapter 1, I look at how effective raising the inflation target would be in mitigating the problems of low inflation. Many economists have proposed raising the inflation target to reduce the probability of hitting the zero lower bound (ZLB). It is both widely assumed and a feature of standard models that raising the inflation target does not impact the equilibrium real rate. I demonstrate that once heterogeneity is introduced, raising the inflation target causes the equilibrium real rate to fall in the New Keynesian model. This implies that raising the inflation target will increase the nominal interest rate by less than expected and thus will be less effective in reducing the probability of hitting the ZLB. The channel is that a rise in the inflation target lowers the average markup by price rigidities and a fall in the average markup lowers the equilibrium real rate by household heterogeneity which could come from overlapping generations or idiosyncratic labor shocks. Raising the inflation target from 2% to 4% lowers the equilibrium real rate by 0.38 percentage points in my baseline calibration. I also analyse the optimal inflation level and provide empirical evidence in support of the model mechanism. In Chapter 2, I study to what degree the recent fall in inflation can explain the rise in firm profitability which has been blamed for a rise in inequality. A theoretical relationship between inflation and profitability is known to exist. I investigate the degree to which the recent fall in inflation can explain the rise in firm profitability. My three primary findings are: 1. The negative relationship between inflation and profitability does not hinge upon the Calvo assumption. Raising inflation significantly lowers profitability under all common price rigidities. The relationship can actually be significantly stronger under menu costs. 2. A rise in the degree to which firms discount the future magnifies the effect; a rise in elasticity of substitution can increase or decrease the effect depending upon the price rigidity. 3. The profit share has risen by around 3.5p.p. since the 1990s. In a richer model with firm heterogeneity, the recent fall in inflation is estimated to explain 14% of the rise. This can increase to 29% if firms are allowed to discount the future by more in line with estimates from the finance literature. I also provide empirical evidence for the negative relationship between inflation and firm profits. In Chapter 3, I examine whether behavioral features can help to explain why some countries have persistently experienced low inflation at the zero lower bound. Economists are keen to introduce behavioral assumptions into modern macroeconomic models. A popular framework for doing so is sparse dynamic programming, which assumes that agents partly base their expectations upon a default model which is typically the steady state. This means agents' expectations will be wrong if there are long-run deviations from the default model and assumes agents can compute the default. I introduce an alternative form of sparse dynamic programming which tackles these problems by allowing for long-run updating to the behavioral part of agents' expectations. I apply this to derive a long-run behavioral New Keynesian model. Within this model, fixed interest rates yield indeterminacy and the costs of remaining at the zero lower bound are unbounded. These results are very different to a behavioral New Keynesian model based upon standard sparse dynamic programming, which can yield determinacy under fixed interest rates and bounded costs of the zero lower bound.

Who is this defendant? A study of capital punishment and the effort to attribute personality (Donta Page)

Cotton, Allison Michelle University of Colorado at Boulder 2002 해외박사(DDOD)

Donta Page was 22 years old when he raped and killed a 24 year old woman in 1999. He was an ex-convict on parole from serving a 10-year sentence in Baltimore, Maryland for a violent crime and he enrolled in a drug and alcohol rehabilitation program in Denver, Colorado as a condition of that parole. During his stay at the Stout Street Foundation, he broke many of the rules and was eventually expelled from the program. On the last day that he spent in Denver, he raped and killed Peyton Tuthill during a burglary of her house when she came home and surprised him during the crime. Donta Page's trial began in November of 2000 and the District Attorney sought the death penalty. During the trial, it was alleged that Donta was the victim of physical, mental, and sexual abuse that impaired his judgement and damaged his brain. The prosecution alleged that Donta was a selfish, cold-blooded murderer. Numerous experts were called to testify on Donta's behalf on the relationship between child abuse and later violence. Donta's mother refused to attend the trial, but some members of his family testified that his mother beat him mercilessly and neglected him for years. The victim's family attended the trial and testified emotionally about the tragic end to her life. Donta Page received life without the possibility of parole and is currently serving that sentence at the Colorado State Penitentiary in Canon City, Colorado. The trial raised issues about the images constructed by attorneys of the defendant, jury deliberations, guided discretion, and resources allocated to death penalty defendants. The penalty phase of the trial raised issues about the veracity of expert witnesses, the designation of “heinousness”, proportionality, and the usefulness of victim impact statements on a three judge panel, which decides whether death is appropriate for capital defendants in Colorado.

Initial deterrent effects of the 1997 Georgia Teen-age and Adult Driver Responsibility Act (HB 681)

Cotton, Carol Phillips University of Georgia 1999 해외박사(DDOD)

A comprehensive DUI law was passed in Georgia in 1997. This law included a graduated drivers license procedure, a zero tolerance blood alcohol concentration (BAC) for drivers under age 21, increased penalties for persons convicted of DUI, mandatory jail sentence for persons with .08 BAC or higher, and tightened plea guidelines. One year of postenactment alcohol-involved fatal automobile crash data was compared to three years of preenactment data to determine any changes in number of fatalities due to impaired driving. An interrupted time series analysis showed a decrease of 2.9 nighttime deaths per month during this time. No change was seen in daytime alcohol-involved automobile fatalities and no change was seen in overall fatalities. A statewide random digit dial telephone survey (N = 1017) was conducted to examine knowledge levels about the law and to examine attitudes about drunk driving in general and about this new law specifically. Results showed few respondents knew specifically the changes imposed by the law and results showed that respondents had no real depth of knowledge about imposed penalties. Overall, 12.8% of the respondents knew the BAC for drivers under age 21 and overall, 8.7% of the respondents knew the unchanged BAC for drivers aged 21 years and older. Significant age and gender differences appeared: younger respondents were more knowledgeable than older respondents and males were more knowledgeable about the law than female respondents. Respondents overwhelmingly agreed that drunk driving is a serious threat to their own safety and to the safety of their families. Respondents agreed that anyone may be a drunk driver. A majority of respondents responded that the penalties imposed by the new law were ‘just about right’, and about 66% of the respondents felt that the law was effective at reducing drunk driving. However, only about 20% of the respondents chose passing stricter laws as the most effective way to combat drunk driving. This preliminary analysis supports the conclusion that fatalities caused by drunk drivers in Georgia decreased following passage of the new law.