Master of Arts (MA), Bowling Green State University, 2024, Popular Culture

Retro video game collecting has seen an increase in popularity in the recent decade, however, with the increase in popularity of digital gaming and digital media the retro video game collectors are an endangered subculture of the video gaming industry due to the increase in digital gaming and the disappearance of the physical commodity. This research takes an autoethnographic approach and uses theories such as, Pierre Bourdieu's theories regarding capital and the field, Karl Marx's theory of commodity, and Ray Oldenburg's theory of the Third Place to explain the importance of this subculture and why retro video game collecting is worth researching.

Committee: Kristen Rudisill Ph.D (Committee Chair); Jeremy Wallach Ph.D (Committee Member) Subjects: Epistemology

Master of Arts, Miami University, 2023, Economics

Sub-Saharan Africa has the highest rates of child marriage in the world today, despite laws and policies targeted at reducing these rates. The region also commonly participates in the traditional practice of bride price payments, a monetary or in kind transfer of gifts from the groom's family to the wife's family around the timing of marriage. Bride price practices incentivize families to make economic decisions about their daughter's marriage and affect the equilibrium of the marriage market. In this paper, I consider how an agricultural commodity price shock affects the probability of child marriage in East Africa using a differences-in-differences-style methodology. I find that a 1 percent increase in the global coffee price increases the rate of child marriage by .66 percentage points for girls in coffee regions compared to non-coffee regions. Mechanisms, including labor allocation within a household and the opportunity cost of paying a bride price during an income shock, are discussed in tandem with the results.

Committee: Gregory Niemesh (Advisor); Jenny Minier (Committee Member); Riley Acton (Committee Member) Subjects: Economics

Master of Arts (MA), Bowling Green State University, 2023, Popular Culture

This study looks at sexual fetishism and commodity fetishism of monsters in popular culture and what results have been made due to the development of combining these two forms of fetishism. The study goes into how the monster's image and effect on a culture has made a significant shift. The shift being how the monster's imagery and presence within a culture had switched from undesirable to desirable. The main reason that is brought up within this study is that the monster's image has undergone a process of being fetishized. This applies to both the image of the monster being subjected to sexual transformation in imagery, as well as the imagery of the monster being fetishized as a commodity and having that imagery bought and sold in stores by appropriate settings. The significance of this work highlights the process of how older concepts of our culture find a new place and why they have ended up in these places. Finally, the study will point out how these forms of fetishism combine and can be found in the modern distributions of luxury goods because of the fetishism.

Committee: Jeremy Wallach Ph. D. (Committee Chair); Kristen Rudisil Ph. D. (Committee Member) Subjects: Folklore; Mass Media

Master of Science (MS), Bowling Green State University, 1950, MBA

Committee: L. F. Monhart (Advisor) Subjects: Business Administration

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2022, Agricultural, Environmental and Developmental Economics

The timely availability of accurate forecasts plays a vital role in informing decisions by farm sector stakeholders. In this dissertation, I evaluate the rationality, accuracy, and informativeness of a range of agricultural forecasts and projections published by the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) and other agencies and examine ways to improve them. The findings have implications for future revisions of the forecasting processes and for policymakers, agricultural businesses, and other stakeholders who use these forecasts. In Chapter 1, I show that some of the reported biases and inefficiencies in USDA forecasts may be due to an asymmetric loss of the forecaster. Many previous studies suggest that many USDA forecasts are biased and/or inefficient. These findings, however, may be the result of the assumed loss function of USDA forecasters. I test the rationality of the USDA net cash income forecasts and the World Agricultural Supply and Demand Estimates (WASDE) production and price forecasts between 1988-2018 using a flexible multivariate loss function that allows for asymmetric loss and non-separable forecast errors. My results provide robust evidence that USDA forecasters are rational expected loss minimizers yet demonstrate a tendency to place a greater weight on under- or over-prediction. As a result, this study provides an alternate interpretation of previous findings of forecast irrationality. Agricultural baselines play an important role in shaping agricultural policy by providing information about the farm sector for a ten-year horizon, yet these projections have not been rigorously evaluated. In Chapter 2, I evaluate the accuracy and informativeness of two widely used baselines for the US farm sector published by the USDA and the Food and Agricultural Policy Research Institute (FAPRI) in three steps. First, I examine the average percent errors of the projections and perform tests of bias. Second, I use a novel testing framework based (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Ani Katchova (Advisor); Wuyang Hu (Committee Member); Brian Roe (Committee Member); Todd Kuethe (Committee Member) Subjects: Agricultural Economics

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2022, Computer Science and Engineering

Commodity passive RFID system consisting of the reader and battery-free RFID tags proliferates the internet-of-things applications (e.g., indoor localization, gesture recognition and assets tracking) due to its low cost and small form factor. In this thesis, we propose three human-centered RFID sensing systems (i.e., RFDiaper, Tago and Allergie) for healthy diapering, safe vehicle-pavement interaction and relative vehicular localization respectively. In RFDiaper, we leverage the coupling effect between the tag and diaper to sense the diaper wetness and identify urine pH value, using twin-tag framework to eliminate the multipath effect. In comparison to the sensor based diaper wetness sensing systems, RFDiaper is low-cost that can sense the diaper wetness and identify the urine pH value simultaneously. To mitigate the other factors (e.g., dynamic environment) on diaper wetness detection and urine pH identification, we propose a novel design with twin tags attached on the diaper. In Tago, we attach RFID tag and reader's antennas at the front end of the vehicle to sense the road surface conditions for safe driving, which is different from the advanced sensor (e.g., Lidar and camera sensors) or smartphone-based road surface sensing systems. To eliminate the impact of dynamic environment and strength the backscattered signals from the road surface, we propose a novel design by cancelling out the line-of-sight reflection from the tag body. As a result, the backscattered signals from the road surface can be analysed to sense the bumps or potholes on the road surface. In Allergie, we also leverage the commodity passive RFID system, which will be attached on our vehicle to predict the approaching direction of the nearby vehicles. Specifically, we attach four tags at the four corners of our vehicle, which will be used to predict the approaching direction of the nearby vehicle (i.e., from left to right at left, from right to left at left, from left to right a (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Kannan Athreya (Advisor); Zhiqiang Lin (Committee Member); Yingbin Liang (Committee Member) Subjects: Computer Engineering; Computer Science; Electrical Engineering

Bachelor of Science (BS), Ohio University, 2021, Journalism

This thesis seeks to understand music marketing from the perspective of past, present, and future; it attempts to identify and explain consumer thoughts and behaviors regarding different music marketing campaigns. Insights from three focus groups combined with what can be drawn from existing research reveal that the future of music marketing will rely on discovery, longevity, and authenticity.

Committee: Josh Antonuccio (Advisor) Subjects: Journalism; Marketing; Music

Master of Arts (MA), Ohio University, 2020, Political Science (Arts and Sciences)

Altered Carbon is a Netflix series that offers a valuable opportunity to analyze a significant contemporary media text from a Marxist feminist perspective. Altered Carbon is a snapshot of problematic modern conceptions of women in labor and society. Women's main avenues of survival are through their bodies and services they provide men. Female characters are still defined by their proximity to male characters struggling to be defined independently from the male. A potential avenue for these problematic representations to change is by changing the producers of media that rely on old stereotypes that confine women to secondary servile positions to men.  

Committee: Judith Grant (Committee Chair); Eve Ng (Committee Member); Julie White (Committee Member) Subjects: Political Science

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 1987, Graduate School

Committee: Not Provided (Other) Subjects: Psychology

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 1986, Graduate School

Committee: Not Provided (Other) Subjects: Economics

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 1985, Graduate School

Committee: Not Provided (Other) Subjects: Economics

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 1982, Graduate School

Committee: Not Provided (Other) Subjects: Business Administration

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 1968, Graduate School

Committee: Not Provided (Other) Subjects: Economics

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2016, Comparative Studies

Visual artists working today encounter a harsh and uncertain economic environment shaped by neoliberal and post-Fordist orientations that have reorganized the long-standing antagonisms between art and commerce. The conjunction of artistic and commercial logics, endured in a permanently uncertain economic environment has generated particular forms of knowledge and ways of being that are the basis of the ethnographic study that follows. By attending to quotidian orders of sense-making through the use of a vernacular framework, my study examines how visual artists working in Columbus, Ohio partake in economic and aesthetic discourses, constructing notions of labor and value, resource management and contingency. I interrogate the informal practices and discursivities that artists come to rely upon in their daily and lived encounters with the economy. Within this context, I am interested in documenting narratives of how artists conceive of, grapple with, and adjust to the anxieties of economic precarity and material insecurity. I investigate how artists' occupational identities are implicated, generated, and modified by contemporary economic and cultural transformations. I also map these narratives onto contestatory distinctions between art and craft, singularity and standardization, gift and commodity. To do this, I train my focus on how artists relate to the concreteness of place, the abstractions of the marketplace and the emphemeralities of performance. My dissertation reveals the ways in which the categories of artist and market are unstable. I show that artists' ways of emplacing themselves within these discursivities are also variant and unstable. That is, my attention to the vernacular sphere reveals artists' informal practices to be complex, knotty and filled with paradoxical entanglements. I reveal artists' stakes in varying discursive inhabitations; the categories artists' valorize or alternatively stigmatize; and how paradoxical, categorical inhabitations (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Amy Shuman Dr. (Advisor); Philip Armstrong Dr. (Committee Member); Dorothy Noyes Dr. (Committee Member); James Sanders Dr. (Committee Member) Subjects: Comparative; Folklore

Doctor of Philosophy, Case Western Reserve University, 2016, Civil Engineering

Regulating pesticides in residential surface soil, air, drinking water, and food is a worldwide problem since pesticides exposure can significantly impact human health. Approximate 25% of the world's nations have provided pesticide soil standards, about half have provided pesticide drinking water standards, about 44% have provided pesticide food standards, and only the U.S. has provided pesticide air standards. Most regulatory jurisdictions regulate individual pesticide exposures independently, although the total pesticide exposure risk depends on the cumulative exposure from soil, water, air, and food. Even for a single source such as soil, jurisdiction pesticide guidance values often vary by five, six, and even seven orders of magnitude. The highest of these values are almost certainly too high to protect human health, especially for children, and the exposures are increased even further by food, air, and water. For the most common pesticides, the exposure contributions from different exposure pathways have been quantified by using risk models to convert guidance values into daily maximum implied dose limits. Most jurisdictions have higher pesticide standard values is that they derived their standards independently without consideration of all exposures. Few nations have promulgated standards for all exposures and most nations regulate pesticide standard for only one or two pesticide exposures. For many nations, the sum of the daily maximum implied dose limit from each exposure was compared. Also a ranking system based on standard completeness and numerical values has been developed to quantify how conservative a country's pesticide exposure standards are for each exposure pathway, and for a person's total pesticide exposure. Nations in Europe have better performance in pesticide standard regulations. Also human health risk models and recommended standard values were developed to help regulatory jurisdictions around the world rationalize their guidance values th (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Aaron Jennings (Committee Chair); Brynjarsdóttir Jenný (Committee Member); Rhoads Kurt (Committee Member); Xiong Yu (Committee Member) Subjects: Civil Engineering; Environmental Engineering

BA, Oberlin College, 2015, English

Journalists often write about the death of various print and media forms—deaths that have yet to occur, but which we continually anticipate in deference to a tacit law which discards the past as a “useless encumbrance” of outmoded styles of consumption. But is that encumbrance necessarily useless? In this paper, I argue that George Gissing's New Grub Street (1891), which narrates the deaths of two realist novelists and has been called an “epitaph for Victorian fiction,” lives out its own virtual death to good purpose. I discuss how Gissing uses the realist novel's transitional or partially exhausted state to conserve social possibilities excluded by consumer society and the newer, less novelistic commodities that circulate within it. I examine theories of consumerism, exploitation, and Realism in the 19th century novel to articulate how a surplus of meaning can so reside in a consumable object.

Committee: William Patrick Day (Advisor); Sandra Zagarell (Committee Member); Natasha Tessone (Committee Member) Subjects: British and Irish Literature; Literature

Master of Arts (MA), Ohio University, 2015, Latin American Studies (International Studies)

For the last ten years, Brazilian commodity share in its exports has grown due to the commodity boom in the 2000s. Nowadays, Brazil is one of the biggest producers of commodities in the world. However, the growth of the commodity sector in the economy has not been followed by the industrial sector, suggesting that the decrease of industrial production might be caused by a deindustrialization happening in Brazil. This thesis aims to study the interrelationship between these sectors using the variables: industrial production, petroleum export value, iron ore export value, coffee export value and the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of Brazil. The econometric model was used and it confirmed the interrelationship of the variables, however with surprise results. Commodity export do affect industrial production, but in a positive manner and GDP also, however mainly in a negative way.

Committee: Roberto Duncan (Committee Chair); Mariana Dantas (Committee Member); Nukhet Sandal (Committee Member); Ariaster Chimeli (Advisor) Subjects: Economics; International Relations; Latin American Studies

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2015, City and Regional Planning

Climate change impacts on water availability and virtual water flows have been analyzed for the 51 U.S. states, using the interregional commodity flows data provided by the Commodity Flow Survey (CFS). The missing data points in the CFS have been estimated using optimization techniques and the available information from the three CFS datasets (value, ton and ton-miles) and three survey years (1997-2007), leading to estimated delivered prices and target values. The interregional commodity trades have then been converted to virtual water trades by using water input coefficients derived from the literature. In departure from earlier studies, a commmodity transportation model is developed for the horizon year of 2060 to simulate the impact of climate change on virtual water trades. The most recent CFS of 2007 is used as the base year to project population growth and the resulting commodity demand in 2060. Growth in commodity demands is then used to project commodity production capacities of states. Commodity flows economic costs are also accounted for by estimating delivered goods unit costs for as many origin-destination pairs as possible. Also, target state-to-state commodity flows have been simulated for 2060, using 2007 commodity flows. To study the impact of climate change, projections for water availablity by state are developed under a benchmark (BM) case and three economic growth scenarios: A2-high emissions, B1-low emissions, and A1B-moderate emissions. The research approach adapts the methodology and information presented by Roy et al. (2012) and regional climate change predictions for the U.S. developed by NOAA. A water stress ranking system is developed which is used to assess the impact of changing water availablity under the different climate scenarios. The results show that several states in the Great Plains would become severely water stressed under the climate change scenarios, as compared to the benchmark (BM) case, particularly North Dakota (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Jean-Michel Guldmann (Advisor) Subjects: Urban Planning

MS, University of Cincinnati, 2004, Engineering : Industrial Engineering

This research studies stochastic multi-commodity network flows which require specified demands to be satisfied at sink nodes. Link capacities fail with exponential rates and are returned to the network after being repaired after an exponentially distributed repair time. Systems under study are continuous time Markov chains. To our knowledge, sensitivity analysis of network flow solutions in terms of link capacities or demands, in deterministic or stochastic networks, has not been addressed in the network flow literature. We define sensitivity in terms of link criticality, and then utilize sensitivity information to estimate expected network availability in the long-run. The proposed methodology is simulation-based and combines deterministic network modeling with stochastic analysis. A linear programming problem that identifies feasible flows in a deterministic multi-commodity network with fixed capacities is formulated. This model is used within a simulation procedure to estimate the average network availability. Numerical examples illustrate the efficiency of the proposed methodologies for hot-spare and cold-spare networks. In the cold-spare network, the proposed methodology finds the route with minimum probability of failure anytime an event occurs. To increase the probability of system availability between any consecutive events, an improved model is suggested that finds a route that avoids critical links as much as possible. The research provides a methodology for investment analysis on link capacities. A criticality metric is proposed that identifies which link causes the majority of network failures. Adding one unit of capacity to this link is expected to have the largest increase in average network availability in the long-run.

Committee: Dr. Bruce Shultes (Advisor) Subjects:

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2005, Geography

Transportation costs are known to significantly impact the level of trade between regions. This is especially true for international truck-based movements requiring passage through border crossings. Movement through border crossings often involves assessment of additional costs such as tolls and transshipment fees, as well as the time consumed by the many operational and procedural difficulties encountered at these locations. The costs associated with negotiating international borders are relatively well known and many agencies and organizations are actively working to reduce them. Various solutions exist for effective improvement, involving both physical and policy related changes. Traditionally, improvements to border crossings have been justified based on their impact to a localized area of interest. However, this type of planning fails to consider how a facility's improvement might affect the transportation system as a whole. This dissertation addresses the impact that border crossing improvement may have on existing patterns of truck activity. Of particular interest is how improvements to crossings can initiate changes to flow patterns observed throughout the transportation system. To facilitate trade among regions, the primary goal for border improvement is to minimize the total transport cost associated with all international freight movements. Given this goal, an optimization model, the Transshipment Facility Improvement Problem (TFIP), is proposed as a tool for modeling the effects of border crossing improvement on trucking between countries. In order to evaluate the impact of crossing improvement on the cost of system-wide truck transportation, the TFIP is applied to the case of North American (United States, Mexico, and Canada) trucking. This application consists of two challenges: (1) obtaining and modeling current trade volumes moved by motor carriers between countries, and (2) modeling the effects of border facility improvement on the cost of moving th (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Morton O'Kelly (Advisor) Subjects: