Development of a decision-making model for selection of serial titles in Latin American university libraries : a solution to increasing prices of periodical publications

Gonzalez-Fernandez, Jorge Luis University Microfilms International 1988 국내박사

Offerings to the Black Christ of Esquipulas: Devotional practice and artistic performance in Santa Cruz, Guanacaste Province of Costa Rica (Spanish text)

Fernandez Gonzalez, Carlos Andres Indiana University 2002 해외박사(DDOD)

Santacruceños, people who inhabit the county of Santa Cruz in the Guanacaste province of Costa Rica, consider the Catholic devotion to the Black Christ of Esquipulas and the artistic performance traditions that are part of it as key aspects of Santacruceño identity. These traditions—including rosary prayers and praise songs—emerge in contemporary practice in such activities as the petitioning of alms (<italic>demanda</italic>), prayer gatherings (<italic>rezos</italic>), fairs (<italic>turnos</italic>) and the yearly festival in honor of the <italic>Patrón</italic>. This dissertation investigates how these popular devotions developed historically, what are their structural, formal, and processual characteristics, how they are practiced today in specific contexts of social interaction, and to what end. The dissertation describes and analyzes traditional religious and artistic practices in small group settings in primarily two communities: San Juan and Santa Cruz, the county seat. The dissertation approaches the subject of Santacruceño devotions through the study of primary historical sources and contemporary scholarship, participant observation and interviews with practitioners, and verbal and musical analyses. In order to understand how these specific forms fit within broader Santacruceño linguistic and musical patterns, the study explores other related forms, including ritual speech, brass band and marimba performances, and dance choreographies that occur within devotional activities. Overall, I seek to discover how individual practitioners use artistic performance in devotional practice to effectively engage and communicate with other participants. Santacruceño popular devotional practice is predicated on the construction of a discreet social body—family members and neighbors, but also visitors—whose primary relationships are founded on Christian beliefs and values and localized cultural traditions. Artistically marked speech, prayer, song, music, and dance give distinct shape and affective energy and vigor to popular religious practice. Conversely, reflections on religion and tradition infuse artistic performance with meaningful content. These three aspects—tradition, religion, and art—emerge through performance during Santacruceño activities and events in honor of their Patrón.

Signature of nNon-standard Cosmologies: From Dark Matter to Primordial Black Holes

Gonzalez, Nicolas Fernandez ProQuest Dissertations & Theses University of Cali 2019 해외박사(DDOD)

If the dark matter is produced in the early universe prior to Big Bang nucleosynthesis, a modified cosmological history can drastically affect the abundance of relic dark matter particles. Here, we assume that an additional species to radiation dominates at early times, whose energy density red-shifts faster than radiation, causing the expansion rate at a given temperature to be larger than in the standard radiation-dominated case. We consider the cases of dark matter production via freeze-out and freeze-in in theses non-standard cosmologies. For the first case, dark matter freeze-out occurs at higher temperatures compared to the standard case, implying that reproducing the observed abundance requires significantly larger annihilation rates. Here, we point out a completely new phenomenon, which we refer to as relentless dark matter: for large enough values of n, unlike the standard case where annihilation ends shortly after the departure from thermal equilibrium, dark matter particles keep annihilating long after leaving chemical equilibrium, with a significant depletion of the final relic abundance. For the case of dark matter production via freeze-in (a scenario when dark matter interacts very weakly, and is dumped in the early universe out of equilibrium by decay or scattering processes involving particles in the thermal bath) the abundance is dramatically suppressed. We quantitatively and analytically study this phenomenon for three different paradigmatic classes of freeze-in scenarios. For the frozen-in dark matter abundance to be as large as observations, couplings between the dark matter and visible sector particles must be enhanced by several orders of magnitude. This sheds some optimistic prospects for the otherwise dire experimental and observational outlook of detecting dark matter produced by freeze-in.Finally, the recent discovery of gravitational waves from binary black hole mergers has given us a new way to study our universe, but the origin of the black holes binaries remains unclear. We investigate how to use information on the effective spin parameter of binary black hole mergers from the LIGO-Virgo gravitational wave detections to discriminate the origin of the merging black holes. We calculate the expected probability distribution function for the effective spin parameter for primordial black holes. Using LIGO-Virgo observations, we then calculate odds ratios for different models for the distribution of black holes' spin magnitude and alignment. We evaluate the posterior probability density for a possible mixture of astrophysical and primordial black holes as emerging from current data, and calculate the number of future merger events needed to discriminate different spin and alignment models at a given level of statistical significance.

Essays on the Macroeconomic Effects of Inequality

Gonzalez-Torres Fernandez, Guzman ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Stanford Universit 2015 해외박사(DDOD)

This dissertation explores the aggregate allocational effects of different forms of economic inequality. Its three chapters, which are outlined in further detail below, study how an uneven distribution of production factors and financial resources, coupled with different forms of bureaucratic hurdles to the development of business ideas, financial constraints, or credit shocks, can affect the distribution and productivity of firms, the composition of the demand for goods and services, or the creation of valuable worker-firm matches in an economy. Even though it becomes clear throughout the dissertation that eliminating as many frictions in the firm-creation process, putting in place different redistribution policies, and alleviating financial frictions in an economy all have great effects on the aggregate economy that were not completely understood in previous theories, the welfare effects of such policies remain a subject for study in future work. In the first chapter, I start with the observation that cross-country estimates find increasing government startup fees for creating a business amount to a substantial decreases in output. According to World Bank data, over 190 countries performed more than 600 reforms to reduce these costs between 2002 and 2013. Nevertheless, output did not respond as expected in any of these cases. Why? I explore the theoretical channels through which these costs translate into aggregate productivity and output distortions. I then estimate the aggregate impact of bureaucratic startup costs for Spain—a developed economy in which startup fees amount to 17 percent of income per capita and the corresponding procedures take over 80 days to complete. I find the effects of startup costs on output to be sizable, but significantly lower than previously thought to be. In particular, reducing monetary costs to US levels increases output by 1.6 percent, whereas reducing time costs to US levels increases output by 3.7 percent. Additionally I find monetary and time costs have very different effects on entrepreneurial selection, the business productivity distribution, and the business size distribution—an issue not addressed previously in the literature.The second chapter studies the relation between income inequality across countries and income inequality within countries from an allocational point of view. In particular, it does so by addressing the question of whether the size of the middle class, defined as the segment of the population following certain demand patterns—consumption of basic need goods up to a point of satiation, substantial demand of mass-produced goods, moderate demand for luxury goods—is a determinant of aggregate output. It first provides a survey on the state of the literature on the matter and then studies the question quantitatively. The main mechanism through which the results are explained is the non-homotheticity of agents’ preferences in the presence of various types of goods, and the different factor intensities in the production of these goods.The third chapter, which is joint work with Daniel Grodzicki, investigates the relationship between labor migration and the supply of consumer credit. Matching data on migration from the US Census with data on credit card mail out offers from Mintel Comperemedia, we find that a greater proportion of households receiving credit card offers is associated with greater inter-state labor migration. Specifically, a 1% increase in the propensity to receive a credit card offers is associated with an 11% increase in the likelihood of moving. Moreover, we find that this is attenuated for richer households, but more important for households moving because they lost their job or are looking for new work. We then set out a simple model of on the job search with credit constraints and fixed costs of migrating to illustrate a channel by which credit availability can spur interstate labor migration.

Teacher Leadership: A District's Human Capital Investment Approach for Elevating Professional Learning

Goldfarb, Alexandra The College of William and Mary ProQuest Dissertat 2020 해외박사(DDOD)