ScholarWorks@Georgia State University

In 2018, dockless, shareable micromobility devices arrived on Atlanta’s streets and sidewalks. The carrier companies that brought them did not coordinate their rollout with city officials. Much like the case in other cities where micromobility devices were introduced, Atlanta did not have the opportunity to prepare for them, meaning that the city had no oversight of the industry. The consequences were rampant clutter, increased danger to riders, pedestrians, and drivers of automobiles, and device-related crimes. News media outlets closely covered the challenges brought on by “e-scooters,” as they came to be known. Eventually, Atlanta passed regulations that expanded the city’s control over the industry but hindered it in the process. This led to vocal backlash, with some Atlantan’s asserting that the scooters and their riders should not shoulder all of the blame, and that automobiles and a lack of suitable infrastructure for innovative transportation technologies were more culpable. This raises questions about why the regulations targeted micromobility in Atlanta instead of other forms of transportation, and what the extent of the impacts of those regulations were. The current study obtains theoretical guidance from the Blackian framework, which proposes in part that socially disadvantaged entities will be vulnerable to legal intervention when they violate or threaten relatively more advantaged entities. To answer the questions at hand, the central investigation consists of a thematic analysis of news media sources (N = 243) to assess the presence of themes that align with the Blackian domains of social space and social time. Themes emerged from the data that suggest that micromobility devices, their riders, and the industry itself were portrayed in a manner that made them vulnerable to legislative intervention. The impact of the regulations is explored through a collection of rider citation reports (N = 100) and internal City of Atlanta communications. Findings suggest that the regulations heavily altered the micromobility market in Atlanta. Conclusions, policy implications, and recommendations for future research are offered.

This research examines the intersection of environmental injustice, water quality violations, and racial and socioeconomic disparities in metro Atlanta’s water service areas. Utilizing Social Vulnerability Index themes in regression models, a significant positive association was found between community vulnerability and water quality violations (p = 0.04) after accounting for water service area population size. Our findings highlight the disproportionate impact of water quality violations on marginalized communities that increase water insecurity, influencing the water cost burden in metro Atlanta. This study advocates for localized, community-centric research methodologies, emphasizing the importance of the Water Cost Burden Survey in understanding and addressing these disparities. Ultimately, this research advocates for targeted strategies and policies to address the systemic inequities affecting urban drinking water quality, contributing significantly to the environmental justice discourse.

This study examined the perceptions of rural principals and faculty members about the principals’ use of transformational leadership practices to lead school improvement efforts. Based on Transformational Leadership Theory and the Professional Standards for Educational Leaders, the study explored how school leaders and faculty view the principals’ leadership as they tackle improving their rural schools. By examining the perceptions of the school leader and their staff members, key attributes that may lead to improvements in rural schools where limited human and fiscal resources are available have been identified. This qualitative study analyzed data collected through interviews with eight leaders and staff and publicly available school improvement plans and other documents to identify themes and patterns. The findings suggest that when principals used transformational leadership practices to convey their vision, the scope of their influence widened. In doing so, the principals built trust, inspired their teacher-leaders, and created a collaboration that allowed both groups to work together to improve schools.

In the field of video game studies, meaningful action and flow are upheld as primary targets of game design, and key factors in many ontological definitions of what games can and should be. Yet, games are not all action. Within most games one encounters numerous pauses and interruptions of various kinds, including the much-maligned “cut-scenes” that lead or force the player out of an active role at certain moments. Furthermore, not all actions are goal-directed. If they are, they are not necessarily pragmatic. These pauses, interruptions, and nuanced goals are often overlooked, if not actively derided, in the field of game studies. In short, ideas about how players stop and reflect, how their goals and experiences take on emotional and/or moral valences, are under-represented. My work argues that moral reflection does occur even in mainstream games, and that it tends to happen in connection with the very moments game scholars often overlook—in the pauses before or after actions, in the moments of awe or realization, when the controller has been set down or the keyboard pushed away, and yes, even during cut-scenes. Such moments may invite the player into a state of moral reflection, but for this state of moral reflection to be poignant and memorable to the player these moments must also involve a consideration of differing values. Finally, how a game structures the player’s experience of time, from receiving quests to setting out into the game world, from pauses to demanding challenges, and even through the layout of video game spaces lends these points of reflection their crucial impact.

This paper investigates the presence of self-attribution bias among mutual fund managers and evaluates its impacts on trading outcomes. I develop a novel GPT-based Natural Language Processing (NLP) architecture designed to extract attribution information from mutual funds' self-assessments of performance in their shareholder reports. On average, mutual fund managers exhibit a significant self-attribution bias—they are 40.6% more likely to attribute performance contributors versus performance detractors to internal factors. Funds displaying stronger self-attribution bias tend to engage in excessive trading and excessive risk-taking in the subsequent reporting period, which negatively impacts their performance. In addition, funds exhibit a higher self-attribution bias following higher performance, despite the fact that biased attribution only influences fund flows when funds perform poorly. Overall, these findings suggest that biased attribution likely stems from cognitive bias rather than strategic choices.

A growing number of public health officials rely on mathematical modeling to aid in making decisions, especially during outbreak responses. Math models simulate health phenomenon with equations and are useful for forecasting a disease’s progression in a population and evaluating the potential effects of interventions. We generated three models to aid practicing health officials with addressing real-world issues.

The first model estimates the impact of immunization strategies on RSV-associated lower respiratory tract infections (LRTIs) among infants <12 months. Users input RSV burden and seasonality and examine the influence of altering product efficacy and uptake assumptions. We used the model to evaluate anticipated immunization products among a US birth cohort. We estimated without immunization, 339,650 – 475,980 LRTIs are attended annually in outpatient clinics, 126,070 – 168,510 in emergency departments (EDs), and 24,760 – 42,900 in hospitals. A passive antibody candidate given to all infants prevented the most LRTIs: 48% of outpatient visits without immunization, 51% of ED visits, and 55% of hospitalizations.

Our second model creates projections of healthcare demand during the early phase of the COVID19 pandemic and evaluates the impacts of social-distancing interventions. Users input case counts, healthcare resources, and select intervention strategies. Using data from Chile, we illustrated the tool as the pandemic unfolded there in April 2020. Our scenarios indicated COVID19 patients could overwhelm hospitals by June 2020, peaking in July or August at more than 6 times the current supply of beds and ventilators. A lockdown strategy or combination of case isolation, home-quarantine, social distancing individuals >70 years, and telework interventions could keep treatment demand below capacity.

Our third model estimated the impact of COVID19 case investigation and contact tracing programs (CICT) in the US. By inputting CICT program data from 23 jurisdictions into our model we estimated CICT averted between 1.1 to 1.4 million cases over 60 days during the pandemic’s first winter peak. Our upper estimate assumes all interviewed cases and monitored contacts complied with isolation and quarantine guidelines, while the lower estimate assumes fractions of interviewed cases and contacts did so. These results suggest CICT programs played a critical role in curtailing the pandemic.

Existing research has extensively considered the ways in which women and men differ in their expressed desire for higher political positions. Yet, little research has been done to understand ambition among women in non-elected political positions. I hope to explain why men are more likely than women to achieve high level staff positions like Chief of Staff and Legislative Director, and why women are often pushed into communications positions rather than policy positions at higher rates than men. To better explain the gap between men and women in career advancement on the Hill, I draw on the literature which examines gender dynamics in the decision to run for office. That literature finds that women are less likely to seek office than men; I argue that the same factors which explain that gender disparity similarly influence the career progression of female congressional staff women in elected political positions. There are three such factors. First, women tend to have lower levels of confidence, leading them to be less likely to seek positions on their own (Fox and Lawless 2011; Pearson & McGhee 2013). Second, those responsible for filling positions do not often recruit women, formally or informally (Fox and Lawless 2010; Aldrich 2002; Jewell and Morehouse 2001; Sanbonmatsu 2006). Finally, women are disproportionately responsible for raising children and other family responsibilities, leaving less time for professional development (Lawless & Fox 2011). All three factors have been linked to fewer women running for elected office, and I argue that they likewise lead to women congressional staff moving slower through the promotion process in Capitol Hill staff careers. I plan to address this in a mixed-methods project, drawing on both interviews from current and former Congressional staff as well as a large N dataset available for purchase from Legistorm.

The development of proteolysis-targeting chimeras (PROTACs) is a useful approach to develop new therapeutics. PROTACs work by tagging proteins for degradation by the ubiquitin-proteasome system (UPS) in the cell. Especially, in this work, we use Halotag, a genetically modified bacterial dehalogenase that forms covalent bonds with ligands functionalized with terminal chlorohexyl moieties. Reported here the development of bifunctional HaloPROTAC ligands that recruit the cereblon (CRBN) E3 ubiquitin ligase to degrade target proteins fused with a HaloTag in the cell. The dissertation will start with a review of the ubiquitin-proteasome system (UPS) system, PROTACs, and induced protein degradation. Next, I will discuss the synthesis and evaluation of CRBN Recruiting HaloPROTACs for degrading proteins. In this collaborative effort, we found that the CRBN-recruiting HaloPROTAC demonstrated higher activities in inducing the degradation of HaloTagged EGFP than an existing VHL-recruiting ligand at sub-micromolar concentrations of the compound. We hypothesize that we can expand the use of the HaloPROTAC system various cell and tissue types for validating the degradation targets for therapeutic discovery. The final chapter of this dissertation is a brief review on the elucidation of the UPS cascade system and a report on the synthesis of unnatural amino acids for the synthesis of ubiquitin conjugates(diUBs) as activity-based probes for deubiquitinating enzymes.