The Equilibrium

Instead of receiving assistance from the state or community, black women are met with that violent racial bias that the conditions of their life seem to be of their doing and choice. As a result, these women are subsequently punished for their life circumstances (e.g. unintended pregnancy) despite their actual efforts to create new possibilities for themselves. This essay hopes to approach the ways in which public health disease assessment of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in black communities has historically been insuf cient in actually tackling the social and structural forces that create poor health outcomes. Instead, it aims to pathologize their culture as a primary factor in the spread of HIV/AIDS.

This paper will investigate the extent to which Switzerland, Nigeria, and Canada have successfully implemented multicultural policy. It will also explore how each nation’s history has affected contemporary multiculturalism within its borders. Nigeria has gone through multiple stages of multicultural policy, from coexistence and celebration of cultural diversity to assimilation and homogenization, since its independence from the British in 1960. Unlike Switzerland, Nigeria struggles with a colonial past that has manifested into detrimental consequences for multicultural policy in the form of religious violence and governmental corruption. The legacy of colonialism has greatly damaged multiculturalism in Nigeria, and it is reflected in their contemporary policies. Switzerland is protectionist both externally and internally. Multicultural policy in Switzerland is, and has historically been, centered around preventing immigrants (second and third generations included) from becoming legal citizens and formally integrating into society. Because of Switzerland’s direct democracy approach, the small homogeneous population of legal citizens have direct power over multicultural policy, and this is one of the main reasons Switzerland struggles to create a prejudice free environment and successfully implement inclusive policy. Canada has been more successful in implementing multicultural policy and this paper will explore how it has accomplished that.

Anton Corbjin’s A Most Wanted Man is an exploration of the spy genre with a postmodern bent, in which the usual tropes such as escapism, exoticism, and technological and political thrill are constantly interwoven into a kind of irony in narrative programs that plays on the subject’s ideas about spies and terrorism. In A Most Wanted Man, viewers are forced to think critically about aesthetic experience in order to find answers to the film’s implied questions; I will argue that a poetics arises from recursive imagery and gives weight to the film’s issues regarding a core, psychoanalytic-existential lack. This lack appears in the form of desire for control within a global power structure and addiction. Rather than giving physical violence any screen time, the film exploits alternative (or perhaps underlying) anxieties to deal with politics: ideology, sex, and addiction bloodlessly drop viewers into thriller territory, exposing the anxieties involved in what we might call ‘post-terrorism.’ Recursive filmic images of “arrest,” or brief lapses in the action which function to anchor NPs to one another, offer certain releases from A Most Wanted Man’s dystopia while simultaneously developing a poetics, through patterns, rhythms, and interweaving with NPs. Recursive images of alcohol and cigarettes will be the focus in this paper, because of their obvious recursive role in the film, but also because smoking is often a universal proxy to psychological issues. During a period of significance for the poetics of recursivity, we observe a shift in Gunther’s cynical, narcissistic, and self-destructive personality. I will then use this aspect of the recursive poetics to psychoanalyze the nature of subjectivity construction in film.

On the spectrum of the persuasion from the basis of Elaborated Likelihood Model (ELM) and Cognitive Dissonance Theory, this paper discusses how persuasion accounts for effects of attitudinal change underlying the elaboration likelihood model. Along with the previous emphasis on the central route and peripheral route as the factors on analysis of persuasion, we hypothesize that one of these routes will affect the result of persuasion. Specifically, we predicted that the participants will be highly persuaded when they are given the central route argument rather than the peripheral route. Participants (n = 344)-mostly non-college students- were randomly selected to participate in an online survey through Mechanical Turk consisting of prompts and questions about the types of investments. The survey contained questions about interest and opinion in the type of investment, using a 9-point Likert scale. The results revealed a significant main effect of interest in bitcoin and gold that showed more preference toward gold, but no signi cant main effect and interaction of peripheral route and central route on interest in the type of investments. Central and peripheral did not significantly differ in their interest of investment types (p = .01). However, gold was significantly more interesting as an investment when compared to bitcoin (p = .95). Our  findings suggest that types of persuasion may not matter in trying to persuade people from investing in bitcoin or gold. This might be due to the priming thoughts about the currency and interest. This suggests that such logic required variable, investment, may alter one’s attitude toward investment based on their previous experiences and beliefs playing an important role in their interest in the investment regardless of persuasion route.

Ambulance dispatch is a system where an operator directs a set of ambulances to locations where people require emergency medical assistance. A few seconds can still be decisive in whether the ambulance and the medical technicians arrive on time to save the patient. To further study how ambulance travel time affects success rates, we have written software to simulate ambulance dispatch using past data. Running this program on varying parameters such as number of ambulances and bases show minor to stark differences in the effectiveness of a group of ambulances to respond to emergency medical cases within a city. Using this tool, it becomes possible to highlight the effectiveness of increasing the number of ambulances in Tijuana in order to better execute ambulance dispatch.