This dissertation investigates how scope relations are constructed and evaluated during real-time human sentence processing. Theoretical approaches to processing scope relations exist in a multi-dimensional space where trade-offs are made around how quickly scope relations can be computed, how many mistakes are made in computing scope relations, and how many...
“Los Grans Mals: Disasters and Civic Life in the Late Medieval Midi” examines the many catastrophes that struck the cities of Marseille and Montpellier during the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries. During this era, southern Europe witnessed increasingly frequent episodes of natural disasters due in part to the Little Ice...
Genetic variation in genes regulating metabolism may be advantageous in some settings but not others. The non-failing adult heart relies heavily on fatty acids as a fuel substrate and source of ATP. In contrast, the failing heart favors glucose as a fuel source. A bootstrap analysis for genes with deviant...
Geographies of Indigeneity: Space, Race, and Power in the Andes (1880-1930), reframes the intellectual construction of indigeneity as the structural principle informing the postcolonial nation in the Andes. My main claim is that Andean scientific elites defined indigeneity as an ethnicity attached to a territory, privileging only Inca-centric lineages and...
This dissertation adopts a jointly ethnographic and historical approach to study shifting racial formations and configurations of inequality in the metropolitan U.S. South. Specifically, it analyzes how immigrants and working poor populations are reshaping the social life, privatized spaces, and conservative politics of Atlanta’s white suburbs. It focuses on Sandy...
Visualization is a powerful tool to help people better communicate and understand data. But the perception and interpretation of data is riddled with bias. Data visualizations are ambiguous objects such that different people viewing the same visualization can come to different conclusions. The ambiguity is likely associated with people's perceptual...
Successful restoration depends on the establishment and survival of selected species, and sowing seed is the most cost-effective method to ensuring a successful restoration. Generally, a locally sourced seed is thought to be better adapted to local environmental conditions and, therefore, more likely to thrive. In addition, a local seed...
Citizen media literacy is essential in a democratic society, particularly in the online environment where valid media sources have proliferated alongside purveyors of fake news. This dissertation explores technologies that automatically detect aspects of bias in news articles, with the ultimate aim of leveraging them to augment media literacy. It...
In the design of efficient adsorbents for the sequestration of toxic molecules and the separation of volatile organic compounds, two important criteria are: high porosity and high density of sorptive sites. The work in this thesis showcases how metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) can be used as porous adsorbent templates where many...
Research over the past several decades has revealed that memory reactivation in sleep contributes to the formation of long-lasting memories. Among the most recent developments in this field is the widespread use of the technique of targeted memory reactivation (TMR), which allows researchers to induce reactivation of specific memories during...