Recent decades have seen fan and “geek” culture become widely popular as the science fiction, fantasy, and superhero stories that used to be the preserve of a smaller subculture of die-hard fans conquered the box office, our televisions, and the best-seller lists. In that same time period, the Internet has...
Romantic and sexual relationships are an integral part of human development, with implications for emotional, social, and physical well-being across the lifespan. However, what, when, and how we teach young people remain pertinent questions. Using a combination of interview data from 24 recent high-school graduates and survey data from a...
Ataxic dysarthria is a disorder affecting the naturalness of speech due to damage to the cerebellum, a neural structure critical for the timing, scaling, and sequencing of speech movements (Ackermann, Vogel, Petersen, & Poremba, 1992; Diener & Dichgans, 1992; Duffy, 2013; Rampello, Rampello, Patti, & Zappia, 2016). In healthy individuals,...
Recent encouraging advances in computer vision and natural language understanding shed light on a very interesting yet challenging task: asking and answering questions about a given image (VQA). The study of this research problem is still in its infancy. Most existing VQA methods are neural network-based (NN-based) solutions that pursue...
With more jobs in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) fields available than people to fill them, the United States is extremely focused on increasing STEM education to address this gap in the future workforce. This focus is not exclusive to higher education and secondary schooling, but rather, it has...
The planarian flatworm Schmidtea mediterranea is capable of recovery from nearly any injury, including regenerating an entire brain after decapitation, made possible by a pool of pluripotent stem cells which maintain all of the worm’s tissues into adulthood. However, the signals that control the production of new neurons in these...
Many theories of categorization have included an intuitive role for our ability to detect and judge similarity. Yet, this important role of similarity processing has been disputed. This research adopts a model of similarity processing through structure mapping (Gentner, 1983) to explore its role in similarity processing and categorization. Relational...
This dissertation examines the behavior of bare singular noun phrases, a set of English nominals showing no formal indication of either definiteness or mass/ count status. Although they appear to be count nouns, I show that these nominals represent maximal projections.
This paper examines the vocal works of Pelle Gudmundsen-Holmgreen in an effort to establish that, despite their technical difficulty and apparent complexity, these pieces are actually rooted in the Danish New Simplicity (Ny Enkelhed) aesthetic. It also provides biographical, historical, and cultural context for those who are interested in performing...
Hollow biopsy needles are widely adopted medical devices for the removal of biological tissue to better identify a lesion or an abnormality observed through a physical exam or a radiology scan. These procedures can provide significantly more information than most medical tests, and they are usually performed on dermis layers,...