PhD, University of Cincinnati, 2019, Design, Architecture, Art and Planning: Regional Development Planning

Globally, climate change impacts threaten the sustainability of human and natural systems. Urban areas, and regions rapidly urbanizing such as Africa, will experience climate change impacts the most. Subsequently, there have been calls to increase capacities to tackle climate change impacts, with a view of promoting sustainability. One such call draws attention to a need for increasing the availability of urban greenspaces. To heed this call demands an understanding of the factors inhibiting effective urban greenspace planning and how they can be planned as climate change interventions (CCIs) to address climate change impacts. This research provides some insights. It was undertaken in the Kumasi Metropolis of Ghana, underpinned by three arguments: (1) Institutional barriers to urban greenspace planning contribute to a low emphasis on urban greenspaces in the Kumasi Metropolis; (2) The socio-cultural factors surrounding the use and demand for urban greenspaces in the Kumasi Metropolis place a low emphasis on urban greenspaces; and (3) The institutional and socio-cultural barriers to urban greenspace planning provide hints of the challenges of planning for CCIs in the Kumasi Metropolis. Findings reveal a low integration of climate change issues in urban development plans in the Metropolis. Consequently, urban greenspace strategies such as tree planting and provision of community parks outlined in urban development plans for the Metropolis have not been framed as CCIs. Although urban greenspace strategies can serve as CCIs in the Metropolis, they are constrained by institutional barriers such as a lack of innovation in visions for urban greenspaces, political interference, inadequate funding, and disharmony in land management. Also, socio-cultural barriers such as residents' low priority for and dwindling use of, and poor maintenance of urban greenspaces limit residents' demand for this amenity, its availability, and the planning of new ones, thereby serving as barrier (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Danilo Palazzo Ph.D. (Committee Chair); Leah Hollstein Ph.D. (Committee Member); Xinhao Wang Ph.D. (Committee Member) Subjects: Urban Planning

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2017, Psychology

Psychologists routinely use item responses to estimate individuals' standing on constructs of theoretical and practical interest. However, in addition to the focal constructs, item responses may be meaningfully influenced by response styles, which are characteristic ways in which participants use rating scales. Response styles may or may not be related to the content of an item and may interfere with the accurate measurement of target constructs. This project focuses on comparing multidimensional item response theory (MIRT) from three model families: difference, divide-by-total, and IRTree models. In addition to ordinal-only models from the three families, I consider two very general models from the divide-by-total (Falk & Cai, 2016) and IRTree (Jeon De Boeck, 2016) families that allow researchers to relax the assumption that Likert-type item responses are purely ordinal. Response style models from the difference model family do not currently exist. Several research questions are addressed using a large set of responses (N = 6,714) to a Big Five personality inventory with 10 items per dimension and a 5- point Likert-type response scale: (1) Can response style models from the divide-by-total and IRTree families be fit to a single set of responses? (2) Is there evidence that response styles should be modeled or can they simply be ignored in terms of statistical model fit (AIC and BIC)? (3) How can IRTree models be extended in such a way that they become more conceptually similar to divide-by-total models for trait and response style dimensions? (4) If there is statistical evidence of response styles in the data, is there also evidence that modeling them makes a practical difference in scores on the target (Big Five) dimensions? The results of this work suggest that failing to model individual differences in extreme and (possibly) midpoint response styles may meaningfully bias expected a posteriori (EAP) scores for at least some personality dimensions. On the other (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Paul De Boeck (Advisor); Michael Edwards (Committee Co-Chair); Michael De Kay (Committee Member) Subjects: Personality Psychology; Quantitative Psychology

Bachelor of Science of Media Arts and Studies (BSC), Ohio University, 2017, Media Arts and Studies

MOLOCH is a game about internal struggles between passive content consent and critical views in systems where digging deeper can lead to darker truths. A top-down 3D game with simple directional movement puzzles, MOLOCH places us behind a desk as a shift manager in a dystopian company. Throughout the game, the player will be confronted with the binary of efficiency vs morality. The game encourages us to increasingly hurry our managed workers, but is the company's goal and corporate approval worth the amoral work we force? Are we ok with the system's tactics aimed at keeping us complacent? MOLOCH takes inspiration from Fritz Lang's 1927 film Metropolis and from the German Expressionism art movement at-large. Increasing anxiety over the networked world's discordant relationships between humanity and the physical world and the rise of social inauthenticity and near endemic individual alienation highlight the intentions of MOLOCH (Klaas, 2016). Adapting a rich history of prior art is critical to the tonal and thematic success of MOLOCH. David Freeman, designer and writer, states that one of the keys to creating a rich world is through adding history (Freeman, 2003). Adding backstory to MOLOCH through ancillary materials, and injecting the sentiments of Metropolis facilitates a rich history. The precise adaptation necessary for analytical success spans visual and audial assets as well; without proper signifiers the tone of the game will be lost due to a lack of thematic cohesion. This aspect will be accomplished through continual examination and inspiration of prior art.

Committee: Novak Beth (Advisor) Subjects: Communication; Film Studies

Master of Arts, The Ohio State University, 2015, Psychology

It is a common assumption in sequential sampling models of simple perceptual decisions that parameters are statistically independent across trials. This thesis addresses theoretical and empirical implications of assuming statistically dependent parameters. Three questions are answered: how to formulate flexible multivariate distributions of parameters of sequential sampling models, what are the predictive consequences of parameter dependencies for mean sample paths and joint distribution of responses and response times, and what correlation matrix is consistent with a benchmark dataset collected from a brightness discrimination task without explicit correlation manipulations. The key to studying dependent parameters is a flexible framework of copulas that allow arbitrary combinations of dependence structures with marginal distributions. Adding correlations to a widely-used diffusion model shows that initial points and absorption times of mean sample paths can be strongly affected by correlations. Whereas the impact of correlation on the joint distribution of behavior is potentially strong adjustment of asymmetry in reaction time distributions of the two responses. Finally, in an experiment without explicit manipulation of correlations, the posterior distribution is consistent with small to moderate correlations between parameters. Thus, under typical experimental conditions, the usual assumption of statistical independence is an adequate simplification of how parameters of simple decision making vary across trials.

Committee: Patricia Van Zandt (Advisor); Edwards Michael (Committee Member); Myung Jay (Committee Member); De Boeck Paul (Committee Member) Subjects: Quantitative Psychology

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2013, Comparative Studies

This work reimagines autonomy in the age of spatial enclosure. Rather than proposing a new version of the escapist running to the hills, "Escape" aligns the desire for disappearance, invisibility, and evasion with the contemporary politics of refusal, which poses no demands, resists representation, and refuses participation in already-existing politics. Such escape promises to break life out of a stifling perpetual present. The argument brings together culture, crisis, and conflict to outline the political potential of escape. It begins by reintroducing culture to theories of state power by highlighting complementary mixtures of authoritarian and liberal rule. The result is a typology of states that embody various aspects of conquest and contract: the Archaic State, the Priestly State, the Modern State, and the Social State. The argument then looks to the present, a time when the state exists in a permanent crisis provoked by global capitalist forces. Politics today is controlled by the incorporeal power of Empire and its lived reality, the Metropolis, which emerged as embodiments of this crisis and continue to further deepen exploitation and alienation through the dual power of Biopower and the Spectacle. Completing the argument, two examples are presented as crucial sites of political conflict. Negative affects and the urban guerrilla dramatize the conflicts over life and strategy that characterize daily existence in the Metropolis. Following a transdisciplinary concern for intensity, the work draws from a variety of historical, literary, cinematic, and philosophical examples that emphasize the cultural dimension of politics. The wide breadth of sources, which range from historical documents on the origins of the police, feminist literature on the politics of emotion, experimental punk film, and Deleuze and Guattari's nomadology, thus emulates the importance of force over appearance found in contemporary radical politics. Departing from many of the accounts (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Eugene W. Holland (Advisor); Philip Armstrong (Committee Member); Mathew Coleman (Committee Member) Subjects: Literature; Philosophy; Political Science

PhD, University of Cincinnati, 2011, Arts and Sciences: Mathematical Sciences

This dissertation includes two parts: developing a new model for individual pharmacokinetics (PK) and applying a Bayesian three-stage hierarchical model to population PK. As to individual PK, the standard methodology is compartment modeling characterized by physiological mechanisms. Parameters in individual PK are estimated based on data from a single individual. In the individual PK part, the relationship between drug concentration and time for an individual was modeled, and the kinetic parameters for an individual were characterized and quantified. Specifically, a piecewise absorption model without physiological compartment mechanisms was developed and applied for Mycophenolic acid (MPA) data that does not obey a one compartment first-order absorption pattern. In the second part of this dissertation, a Bayesian three-stage hierarchical model was applied to population PK using simulated multi-occasion PK data with both inter-individual variability (IIV) and inter-occasion variability (IOV). This Bayesian approach was applied to three PK models. First, a PK model with independent IOV was studied, and different variances at different occasions were estimated. Second, a PK model with multivariate covariates and correlated and constrained IOV was studied, and unequal constrains in the variance matrix was modeled. Third, a PK model with arbitrary IOV was studied, and four inverse Whishart priors for IOV with different scale matrices were investigated. Based on the result and analysis, a recommendation of choosing the prior distribution was made according to whether or not a reliable source of the covariance matrix exists. For all population PK models, Gibbs sampling and Metropolis-Hasting algorithm were implemented using SAS IML to generate samples from posterior distributions.

Committee: Siva Sivaganesan PhD (Committee Chair); James Deddens PhD (Committee Member); Seongho Song PhD (Committee Member); Paul Horn PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: Statistics

PhD, University of Cincinnati, 2008, Arts and Sciences : Mathematical Sciences

In this dissertation, Bayesian solutions have been given to the repeated measure model (chapter II), the nested random effects repeated measure model (chapter III), the mixture model consisting of a censored lognormal distribution and a point mass distribution (chapter IV), and the mixture model with random effects (chapter V), for the analyses of data with values below the Limit of Detection (LOD). The Markov chain Monte Carlo methods (Gibbs sampler and Metropolis-Hastings algorithm) were implemented to generate posterior samples for model parameters from the full conditional distributions. The Deviance Information Criterion (DIC) was calculated in MCMC in order to compare the fit and complexity between Bayesian models. SAS macros written in PROC IML were developed to output Bayesian estimates and the DICs for all the models discussed in this dissertation.

Committee: James A. Deddens PhD (Committee Chair); Siva Sivaganesan PhD (Committee Member); Paul S. Horn PhD (Committee Member); Xiaodong Lin PhD (Committee Member); Seongho Song PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: Mathematics; Statistics

MS ARCH, University of Cincinnati, 2007, Design, Architecture, Art and Planning : Architecture

This thesis aims to study the specific theme of insecurity and its spatial manifestation as walls, fences and related physical objects and electronic accessories of division that create and enhance spatial divisions, as well as restrict access to homes, buildings, and installations in the twentieth century metropolis. The ideas of insecurity and its spatial manifestations investigated here will be grounded in Georg Simmel's classic essay “The Metropolis and Mental Life”, first published in 1903. To that end, the primary exploration of the thesis revolves around the semiotic and psychological experiences of the individual that arises from his interaction with the visual aspects of elements of spatial division such as gates, fences, surveillance mechanisms and walls. How does the shared cognitive outlook of fear that arises from such experiences influence the conceptualization of public space in the city? How does the conceptualization of the contemporary city as an idea rooted in the production and consumption of space inform urban spatial expression? If applicable, what are the limitations of such analogies as reflected in the writings under investigations. If not applicable, what are the possible common denominators of the ideas of insecurity in the writings. Thus, the primary argument of this essay is: following a careful investigation of Simmel's “The Metropolis and Mental Life”, one might discover that urbanization and its spatial manifestation in the spaces of division- engenders a particular kind of struggle that is focused on meeting the needs of everyday existence- creates a space of interaction that encourages individual insecurity, loss and alienation within the contemporary metropolis.

Committee: Nnamdi Elleh (Advisor) Subjects:

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2012, Statistics

The multiset sampler (MSS) proposed by Leman et al. (2009) is a new MCMC algorithm, especially useful to draw samples from a multimodal distribution, and easy to implement. We generalize the algorithm by re-defining the MSS with an explicit description of the link between a target distribution and a limiting distribution. The generalized formulation makes the idea of the multiset (or K-tuple) applicable not only to Metropolis-Hastings algorithms, but also to other sampling methods, both static and adaptive. The basic properties of implied distributions and methods are provided. Drawing on results from importance sampling, we also create effective estimators for both the basic multiset sampler and the generalization we propose. Simulation and practical examples confirm that the generalized multiset sampler (GMSS) provides a general and easy approach to dealing with multimodality and improving a chain's mixing.

Committee: Steven MacEachern PhD (Advisor); Christopher Hans PhD (Committee Member); Mario Peruggia PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: Statistics

Master of Arts (MA), Ohio University, 2010, African Studies (International Studies)

This study uses qualitative methodology to examine the contributions of Non-Governmental Organizations in response to the conditions of Orphans and Vulnerable Children (OVC) in Kano metropolis. The study investigates what these organizations do, what methods, techniques, and strategies they employ to identify the causes of OVC's conditions for intervention. The study acknowledges colonization, globalization, poverty, illiteracy, and individualism as contributing factors to OVC's conditions. However, essentially, the study identifies gross misunderstanding between paternal and maternal relatives of children to be the main factor responsible for the OVC's conditions. This social disorganization puts the children in difficult conditions including exposure to health, educational, moral, emotional, psychological, and social problems. The thesis concludes that through "collective efficacy" the studied organizations are a perfect means for solving-problem. The associations operate on existing family structures, cement relationships, provide social networking among the contending relatives, and most importantly positively impacting the lives of the OVC.

Committee: Howard Steve (Committee Chair); Diane Ciekawy (Committee Member); Godwyll Franciss (Committee Member) Subjects: Social Structure; Social Work; Sociology; Welfare