Browsing by Subject "Occupation"
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Item The impact of rater characteristics on oral assessments of second language proficiency(2014-05) Su, Yi-Wen; Pulido, Diana C.This literature review sets out to revisit the studies exploring impact of rater characteristics on language oral assessments. Three categories of raters' backgrounds: occupation, accent familiarity, and native language are identified and will be addressed respectively in the following sections. The results showed that no consensus regarding raters' occupational background, linguistic background and native-speaker status on examiners' rating has been found so far. However, this review will highlight the current testing situations, bring up limitations from previous studies, provide implications for both teachers and raters, and hopefully shed light on future research.Item Stars and stripes over the Orient : U.S. occupation of China 1900-1932(2021-05-07) Zhang, Kevin (M.A.); O'Connell, Aaron B., 1973-Modern scholarship on US military history covers the 20th century extensively, but the role and actions of the US military in China between 1900-1932 are covered unevenly at best. Service in China came to mean different things to the US Army and Marine Corps. In this paper, I examine US diplomatic and military objectives during this period as well as contemporary accounts of the soldiers and Marines who served in China to examine the origins of this historical blindspot. Each service was shaped by the new roles placed on them by growing US global power and influence during the early 1900s. As the US became increasingly involved in the Pacific and in safeguarding Chinese sovereignty, the Marine Corps and US Army were integral parts of that mission. I argue that while both soldiers and Marines were critical to US objectives in the region, each service’s unique priorities and self-perceptions meant that they interpreted the period and its importance through a different lens. Because their role in China reinforced institutional identity, contemporary Marines were not only quick to advertise their role in China; subsequent generations of Marines would carry on that history to the modern day. In contrast, US Army operations in China served as competition for the service’s priorities in modernization and reformation. As a result, service in China and the soldiers that performed it were increasingly marginalized until they ceased to be represented in Army institutional histories. Marine and Army recollection during this period serves as a case study for how the services inadvertently censor their institutional histories as events perceived as less important or peripheral recede from the collective history.Item The production of an urban revolution: tactics, police and public space in Cairo’s uprising(2011-05) Gaber, Sherief A.; Dooling, Sarah; Getman, Julius G.The following thesis presents a narrative of the uprisings that took place in Cairo, Egypt between 25 January, 2011 and 11 February, 2011 as they relate to notions of cities, the state and citizenship in spatial terms. I do so by looking at different series of events that took place during those 18 days of revolution: spatial tactics that protestors used against police, popular committees set up by neighborhoods to defend the streets after the withdrawal of the Egyptian police, the sudden participation of nonpolitical actors and groups, and ultimately the occupation of Cairo's Tahrir Square and the production of public space and new notions of citizenship that occurred within the square during this period. These various narratives are used to argue that sovereignty is ultimately very spatially limited (ontologically, not necessarily territorially), how the "informal" city and modes of urban existence produced not just resistance to the state but were transformed into tools of provocation and insurrection, and how public space—devalorized and heavily policed by the Egyptian state—was produced through the actions of protestors occupying Tahrir Square.Item The sacrifice of saying no : dynamics of conscientious objection, liberalism, and sacrifice in Israel(2017-05) Tripp, Angela R.; Grumberg, KarenThis thesis engages notions of liberalism and sacrifice to argue for the exceptional goodness of Israel’s secular, Jewish conscientious objectors who operate against an illiberal and politicized military system. It examines theoretical and empirical models of democratic and republican paradigms to analyze the dynamics of Israel’s citizen/state relationship. It draws from oral histories and ethnographic works, to document the lived experiences of conscientious objectors, thus providing a case study of Israel’s democratic liberalism in action. In constructing a comparative analysis of the functionality of Israel’s military apparatus, specifically its Conscience Committee, an argument for the waning liberalism of Israel’s already hybrid political system is presented. Given the problematic functionality of Israel’s military structure and its necessarily political nature, the motives and behavior of Israel’s secular, Jewish conscientious objectors evidence their “goodness” as Israeli citizens. This thesis offers a qualitative analysis of that goodness by engaging disparate political and social theories.Item Three essays on the economics of time use(2009-05) Lim, Jean, 1972-; Hamermesh, Daniel S.Economists have rejected the popular view that time use is primarily influenced by local customs and law, and instead argue that it is determined by optimal choices of economic agents and the market mechanism. However the analysis of time allocation has been focused on the labor-leisure choice problem which posits a worker who wants more leisure because of his preference for leisure over work. Thus going beyond the standard model, these essays add to the theory of the economics of time use. First I examine why married men earn more. I explore the possibility that differences in household work by marital status can explain the observed male marital wages advantage. Depending on the type and timing of household work, I segregate it into flexible and inflexible household work, using the American Time Use Survey. Empirical results provide strong support for the productivity difference between married and never married men. Household work has significant negative and differential effects on wages. The effects are not only driven by total time spent on household work, but also by types and timing of household work. The result shows that inflexible household work has a stronger negative effect on wages than flexible household work. Second I study how taxes affect time and goods allocation in home production. I claim that an increase in sales taxes encourages households to substitute away from the market goods input in favor of untaxed non-market time input. I explore the substitution response by relating household market purchases and time use. The theory part shows that the size of elasticity of substitution between market goods input and time input is crucial for understanding the government's optimal tax policy. Then I show that it is optimal to impose lower taxes on goods used in the production of commodities with a higher elasticity of substitution. In the empirical part, I estimate sizes of elasticities of substitution of goods for time with the combined survey of Mexican household consumption expenditures and time allocation for 2002. I find that the elasticity of substitution for 'Eating' is lowest. Finally wage compensation for climate is examined. Using the Merged Outgoing Rotation Group File from 2002 to 2007, I find that the North-South wage differential in construction and extraction occupations is much higher than in any other occupations. I claim that this is because weather affects wage determination. If individuals are to locate in both desirable and undesirable locations, undesirable locations must offer higher wages. Using the O*NET database, I obtain information on how often an occupation requires exposure to weather conditions. Estimation results of the wage equation show that wage compensation for living in bad weather amounts to 11.9 percent of hourly wages evaluated at sample means. The difference in wage compensation for working in bad weather between the most exposed (outdoorness index = 5) and least exposed (outdoorness index = 0) occupations is estimated to be 9.6 percent of hourly wages evaluated at sample means. In addition, I find that the occupational injury risk is related to weather conditions in the case of construction and extraction occupations.