Without women: Masculinities, gay male sexual culture and sexual behaviors in Miami, Florida

Recent studies have reported alarmingly high rates of HIV infection and risky sexual behaviors among gay men in Miami, Florida. Previous research has suggested that the risky sexual behaviors of many gay men reflect the pursuit of intimacy and love, and that barriers to intimate relationships among gay men may stem from traditional masculinity norms. This dissertation examines the meanings which gay men ascribe to their sexual behaviors, as well as the intersections of those meanings with both traditional masculinity constructions and Miami's gay male sexual culture. ^ The study is based upon participant observation, print media content analysis, surveys and ethnographic interviews of a purposive snowball sample of 30 Cuban American, Puerto Rican, African American and Anglo gay men who reside in Miami-Dade County, Florida. Analysis of research questions was accomplished through grounded theory methods and descriptive and non-parametric statistics, including Pearson chi-square, Fisher's Exact and Mann-Whitney U tests. ^ The study shows that culturally-specified masculinity norms vary in the relative importance ascribed to heterosexual prowess, economic providership and competitiveness. These cultural differences appear important not only to the timing of sexual awareness and to the strength of homosexual stereotyping as effeminacy, but also to men's strategies in coming out as gay. The meanings men attributed to their sexual behaviors were, however, constructed in response to both inherited masculinity norms and the hypermasculine structure of Miami's gay male sexual culture. In addition to providing an ethnographic account of this subculture, the study elaborates men's issues relative to casual sex and committed relationships. Unprotected anal intercourse with casual partners during the previous twelve months was associated with growing up without one's father in the home, having been teased for effeminacy during childhood, being defensive about one's masculinity, not trusting men, having been cheated on by boyfriends, and believing that long-term gay male relationships are problematic. ^ It is concluded that the continuing epidemic of HIV infections among local gay men, as well as the hypermasculine form of the gay sexual subculture itself, are nihilistic symptoms embedded in the masculinist gender structure of the larger society. ^

How do partnerships lead to a competitive advantage? Applying the resource based view to nascent social ventures

This dissertation is one of the earliest to systematically apply and empirically test the resource-based view (RBV) in the context of nascent social ventures in a large scale study. Social ventures are entrepreneurial ventures organized as nonprofit, for-profit, or hybrid organizations whose primary purpose is to address unmet social needs and create social value. Nascent social ventures face resource gaps and engage in partnerships or alliances as one means to access external resources. These partnerships with different sectors facilitate social venture innovative and earned income strategies, and assist in the development of adequate heterogeneous resource conditions that impact competitive advantage. Competitive advantage in the context of nascent social ventures is achieved through the creation of value and the achievement of venture development activities and launching. The relationships between partnerships, heterogeneous resource conditions, strategies, and competitive advantage are analyzed in the context of nascent social ventures that participated in business plan competitions. A content analysis of 179 social venture business plans and an exploratory follow-up survey of 72 of these ventures are used to analyze these relationships using regression, ANOVA, correlations, t-tests, and non-parametric statistics. The findings suggest a significant positive relationship between competitive advantage and partnership diversity, heterogeneous resource conditions, social innovation, and earned income. Social capital is the type of resource most significantly related to competitive advantage. Founder previous start-up experience, client location, and business plan completeness are also found to be significant in the relationship between partnership diversity and competitive advantage. Finally the findings suggest that hybrid social ventures create a greater competitive advantage than nonprofit or for-profit social ventures. Consequently, this dissertation not only provides academics further insight into the factors that impact nascent social value creation, venture development, and ability to launch, but also offers practitioners guidance on how best to organize certain processes to create a competitive advantage. As a result more insight is gained into the nascent social venture creation process and how these ventures can have a greater impact on society.

Spatial scale and abundance patterns of large fish communities in freshwater marshes of the Florida Everglades

Anthropogenic habitat alterations and water-management practices have imposed an artificial spatial scale onto the once contiguous freshwater marshes of the Florida Everglades. To gain insight into how these changes may affect biotic communities, we examined whether variation in the abundance and community structure of large fishes (SL . 8 cm) in Everglades marshes varied more at regional or intraregional scales, and whether this variation was related to hydroperiod, water depth, floating mat volume, and vegetation density. From October 1997 to October 2002, we used an airboat electrofisher to sample large fishes at sites within three regions of the Everglades. Each of these regions is subject to unique watermanagement schedules. Dry-down events (water depth , 10 cm) occurred at several sites during spring in 1999, 2000, 2001, and 2002. The 2001 dry-down event was the most severe and widespread. Abundance of several fishes decreased significantly through time, and the number of days post-dry-down covaried significantly with abundance for several species. Processes operating at the regional scale appear to play important roles in regulating large fishes. The most pronounced patterns in abundance and community structure occurred at the regional scale, and the effect size for region was greater than the effect size for sites nested within region for abundance of all species combined, all predators combined, and each of the seven most abundant species. Non-metric multi-dimensional scaling revealed distinct groupings of sites corresponding to the three regions. We also found significant variation in community structure through time that correlated with the number of days post-dry-down. Our results suggest that hydroperiod and water management at the regional scale influence large fish communities of Everglades marshes.

Trajectories of Vegetation Response to Water Management in Taylor Slough, Everglades National Park, Florida

Ecosystem management practices that modify the major drivers and stressors of an ecosystem often lead to changes in plant community composition. This paper examines how closely the trajectory of vegetation change in seasonally-flooded wetlands tracks management-induced alterations in hydrology and soil characteristics. We used trajectory analysis, a multivariate method designed to test hypotheses about rates and directions of community change, to examine vegetation shifts in response to changes in water management practices within the Taylor Slough basin of Everglades National Park. We summarized vegetation data by non-metric multidimensional scaling ordination, and examined the time trajectory of each site along environmental vectors representing hydrology and soil phosphorus gradients. In the Taylor Slough basin, vegetation change trajectories closely followed the hydrologic changes caused by the operation of water pumps and detention ponds adjacent to the canals. We also observed a shift in vegetation composition along a vector of increasing soil phosphorus, which suggests the need for implementing measures to avoid P-enrichment in southern Everglades marl prairies. This study indicates that shifts in vegetation composition in response to changes in hydrologic conditions and associated parameters may be detected through trajectory analysis, thereby providing feedback for adaptive management of wetland ecosystems.

Measuring effectiveness in international financial crime prevention: Can we agree on a performance metric?

The attempts at carrying out terrorist attacks have become more prevalent. As a result, an increasing number of countries have become particularly vigilant against the means by which terrorists raise funds to finance their draconian acts against human life and property. Among the many counter-terrorism agencies in operation, governments have set up financial intelligence units (FIUs) within their borders for the purpose of tracking down terrorists’ funds. By investigating reported suspicious transactions, FIUs attempt to weed out financial criminals who use these illegal funds to finance terrorist activity. The prominent role played by FIUs means that their performance is always under the spotlight. By interviewing experts and conducting surveys of those associated with the fight against financial crime, this study investigated perceptions of FIU performance on a comparative basis between American and non-American FIUs. The target group of experts included financial institution personnel, civilian agents, law enforcement personnel, academicians, and consultants. Questions for the interview and surveys were based on the Kaplan and Norton’s Balanced Scorecard (BSC) methodology. One of the objectives of this study was to help determine the suitability of the BSC to this arena. While FIUs in this study have concentrated on performance by measuring outputs such as the number of suspicious transaction reports investigated, this study calls for a focus on outcomes involving all the parties responsible for financial criminal investigations. It is only through such an integrated approach that these various entities will be able to improve performance in solving financial crime. Experts in financial intelligence strongly believed that the quality and timeliness of intelligence was more important than keeping track of the number of suspicious transaction reports. Finally, this study concluded that the BSC could be appropriately applied to the arena of financial crime prevention even though the emphasis is markedly different from that in the private sector. While priority in the private sector is given to financial outcomes, in this arena employee growth and internal processes were perceived as most important in achieving a satisfactory outcome.

Learning Data-Driven Models of Non-Verbal Behaviors for Building Rapport Using an Intelligent Virtual Agent

There is a growing societal need to address the increasing prevalence of behavioral health issues, such as obesity, alcohol or drug use, and general lack of treatment adherence for a variety of health problems. The statistics, worldwide and in the USA, are daunting. Excessive alcohol use is the third leading preventable cause of death in the United States (with 79,000 deaths annually), and is responsible for a wide range of health and social problems. On the positive side though, these behavioral health issues (and associated possible diseases) can often be prevented with relatively simple lifestyle changes, such as losing weight with a diet and/or physical exercise, or learning how to reduce alcohol consumption. Medicine has therefore started to move toward finding ways of preventively promoting wellness, rather than solely treating already established illness. Evidence-based patient-centered Brief Motivational Interviewing (BMI) interven- tions have been found particularly effective in helping people find intrinsic motivation to change problem behaviors after short counseling sessions, and to maintain healthy lifestyles over the long-term. Lack of locally available personnel well-trained in BMI, however, often limits access to successful interventions for people in need. To fill this accessibility gap, Computer-Based Interventions (CBIs) have started to emerge. Success of the CBIs, however, critically relies on insuring engagement and retention of CBI users so that they remain motivated to use these systems and come back to use them over the long term as necessary. Because of their text-only interfaces, current CBIs can therefore only express limited empathy and rapport, which are the most important factors of health interventions. Fortunately, in the last decade, computer science research has progressed in the design of simulated human characters with anthropomorphic communicative abilities. Virtual characters interact using humans’ innate communication modalities, such as facial expressions, body language, speech, and natural language understanding. By advancing research in Artificial Intelligence (AI), we can improve the ability of artificial agents to help us solve CBI problems. To facilitate successful communication and social interaction between artificial agents and human partners, it is essential that aspects of human social behavior, especially empathy and rapport, be considered when designing human-computer interfaces. Hence, the goal of the present dissertation is to provide a computational model of rapport to enhance an artificial agent’s social behavior, and to provide an experimental tool for the psychological theories shaping the model. Parts of this thesis were already published in [LYL+12, AYL12, AL13, ALYR13, LAYR13, YALR13, ALY14].

An investigation of the relationships among self-care behaviors, health beliefs, and metabolic control in the non-insulin-dependent diabetic adult

Self-care and health beliefs have been found to be important concepts in the management of chronic diseases such as diabetes mellitus. Poor metabolic control has been associated with a higher incidence of complications in diabetic patients. This study sought to explore any relationships among perceptions of self-care behaviors, health beliefs and metabolic control. The sample consisted of 52 outpatients with non-insulin-dependent diabetes from a large teaching medical center. Interviews were done to obtain the patients' perceptions of their self-care behaviors, and their health beliefs concerning diabetes. Results of glycosylated hemoglobin and/or serum glucose levels were obtained from the medical records. Data were analyzed using Cochran-Mantel-Haenzel statistics, and Pearson's r. Results indicated no significant relationships among perceptions of self-care behaviors, health beliefs and metabolic control. Ethnicity, education and gender were found to be significantly associated with self-care behaviors and health beliefs.

Learning data-driven models of non-verbal behaviors for building rapport using an intelligent virtual agent

There is a growing societal need to address the increasing prevalence of behavioral health issues, such as obesity, alcohol or drug use, and general lack of treatment adherence for a variety of health problems. The statistics, worldwide and in the USA, are daunting. Excessive alcohol use is the third leading preventable cause of death in the United States (with 79,000 deaths annually), and is responsible for a wide range of health and social problems. On the positive side though, these behavioral health issues (and associated possible diseases) can often be prevented with relatively simple lifestyle changes, such as losing weight with a diet and/or physical exercise, or learning how to reduce alcohol consumption. Medicine has therefore started to move toward finding ways of preventively promoting wellness, rather than solely treating already established illness.^ Evidence-based patient-centered Brief Motivational Interviewing (BMI) interventions have been found particularly effective in helping people find intrinsic motivation to change problem behaviors after short counseling sessions, and to maintain healthy lifestyles over the long-term. Lack of locally available personnel well-trained in BMI, however, often limits access to successful interventions for people in need. To fill this accessibility gap, Computer-Based Interventions (CBIs) have started to emerge. Success of the CBIs, however, critically relies on insuring engagement and retention of CBI users so that they remain motivated to use these systems and come back to use them over the long term as necessary.^ Because of their text-only interfaces, current CBIs can therefore only express limited empathy and rapport, which are the most important factors of health interventions. Fortunately, in the last decade, computer science research has progressed in the design of simulated human characters with anthropomorphic communicative abilities. Virtual characters interact using humans’ innate communication modalities, such as facial expressions, body language, speech, and natural language understanding. By advancing research in Artificial Intelligence (AI), we can improve the ability of artificial agents to help us solve CBI problems.^ To facilitate successful communication and social interaction between artificial agents and human partners, it is essential that aspects of human social behavior, especially empathy and rapport, be considered when designing human-computer interfaces. Hence, the goal of the present dissertation is to provide a computational model of rapport to enhance an artificial agent’s social behavior, and to provide an experimental tool for the psychological theories shaping the model. Parts of this thesis were already published in [LYL+12, AYL12, AL13, ALYR13, LAYR13, YALR13, ALY14].^