"Recently, there has been a public push for the film industry to improve female representation; subsequently, DC and Marvel released female-lead films Wonder Woman and Captain Marvel to critical praise and record box office figures. Strictly looking at industry measures of success (critics’ reviews and box office totals) it would...
Forecasting the outcomes of U.S. elections is a relevant and complex task that has been approached in many ways, most commonly incorporating statistics or proprietary methods that include some degree of subjectivity. Our approach differs from this convention in that we use multidisciplinary methods from applied mathematics. Specifically, we use...
With concerns about how to feed an exponentially growing, increasingly obese population, humanity’s relationship with food is a pressing concern. Evaluating the evolutionary changes in the composition of gut microbiota (GM), defined as the microorganisms that live in the digestive tract, may offer insight into how human bodies have adapted...
In everyday conversation, individuals actively process speech in order to comprehend and respond in real-time. As a word unfolds, listeners activate possible lexical candidates and actively determine the target word as they receive more information, a process referred to as incremental processing. This process requires knowledge of one’s native spoken...
We think data is definitive, but our perception of it contains bias from expectations and motivations. For example, when Democrats and Republicans view the same depiction of global temperature trends, Democrats see an increasing trend, while Republicans see overall flatness. Could prior beliefs bias our perception of relations depicted in...
Efficiency and equity have always been the key dilemma in local economic developments. On the one hand, economic prosperity is crucial for sustainable growth; on the other hand, the neighborhoods might undergo gentrification, transforming the area to appeal to high-end markets. Hence, vulnerable or indigenous residents might face displacements, and...
In the era of international volunteerism, mounting evidence suggests that the presence of unskilled and culturally unaware volunteers in the Global South fosters “voluntourism”, and endangers the very populations and institutions that volunteers want to help. Northwestern does not enforce a pre-trip curriculum for student organizations that coordinate private service...
Listeners have difficulty understanding speech in environments containing background noise. This difficulty is exacerbated for listeners with hearing loss, which is often attributed to the degradation of the speech signal caused by interfering noise, impaired hearing, hearing device processing, or a combination of these factors. To resolve and understand speech...
The successful development of vaccines for triple negative breast cancer (TNBC) has been hindered because there are no identified tumor-associated antigens. As an alternative to peptide vaccines, the administration of tumor lysates has been investigated in TNBC to activate the immune system against tumors, wherein a mixture of tumor-specific lysates...
Colombian journalist Jineth Bedoya was kidnapped on May 25, 2000 when covering a prison riot in Bogotá. Held hostage for 16 hours, the journalist was repeatedly raped and tortured in response to her journalistic work. Due to its level of brutality and impunity, Bedoya’s story has become emblematic in Colombia....