HBO Series Girls and Insecure’s Depiction of Race and Gender

In this research study the identification and representation of race and gender were looked at in the primetime HBO television series Insecure and Girls. The characters that were analyzed in two episodes were the young black women of Insecure and in two episodes the young white women in Girls. The method for this study was conducted using content analysis to identify the following variables focusing on identity, racial stereotypes and names used to address one another. Additionally, variables to identify gender included emotional approaches to situations, stereotypes and gender role expectations. The comprehensive findings revealed through similarities and differences of the episodes containing similar plot lines, as well as the overall analysis of each show, gave insight on how race and gender is being presented. Consistently throughout each of the episodes in terms of gender representation, emotional approaches to situations was the variable with a fair amount of content found. Although anticipated prior to conducting research, gender role expectations were shown less often by the women in each series. Race identity was another variable chosen that also resulted as being less frequently identifiable. In terms of race and gender stereotypes that were looked at, gender stereotypes were more prominent within each of the episodes. The variable used to identify race in each episode, names used to address one another, were mentioned more throughout the episodes of Insecure than in Girls

Strict monotonicity properties in one-dimensional excited random walks

We consider one-dimensional excited random walks with finitely many cookies at each site. There are certain natural monotonicity results that are known for the excited random walk under some partial orderings of the cookie environments. We improve these monotonicity results to be strictly monotone under a partial ordering of cookie environments introduced by Holmes and Salisbury. While the self-interacting nature of the excited random walk makes a direct coupling proof difficult, we show that there is a very natural coupling of the associated branching process from which the monotonicity results follow