This dissertation aims to: 1) characterize the range of beliefs museum practitioners have about racial, ethnic, and cultural diversity; 2) their understanding of the role of race, culture, and ethnicity in minoritized learners’ sensemaking; and 3) the areas of tension and symmetry between practitioners’ values and their perception of their...
This dissertation explores the reciprocal relationship between international politics and digital computation since the 1960s by examining the first attempts to use computer simulation to credibly forecast our planet’s economic and environmental future on a global scale. In particular, this project offers the first sustained historical analysis of the origins...
Introduction: Irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) is a disorder of gut-brain interaction associated with reduced quality of life, increased rates of depression and anxiety, and high economic burden to society and the individual. Current behavioral interventions, which target well-known symptom exacerbating factors such as catastrophizing and gastrointestinal- specific anxiety, have demonstrated...
Bitcoin is a decentralized payment system proposed in 2008 by Nakamoto, who remains anonymous to date. It offers an effective alternative to fiat money or centralized payment systems with advantages on privacy, anonymity, and low international remittance fees. The transactions in Bitcoin payment system are sent through a peer-to-peer network,...
This dissertation addresses questions in the fields of household finance and corporate finance. In Chapter 1, I use a quasi-experiment in Norway to examine how households respond to capital taxation. The introduction of a new wealth assessment methodology in 2010 led to geographic discontinuities in household exposure to wealth taxes,...
Language is a hallmark of human cognition—a rich and flexible method of representing the world around us. As such, language provides an invaluable resource to human infants: a way of gaining insight into the representations that guide adult cognition. In this dissertation, I explore how language influences infants’ cognition as...
Western scientific norms (e.g., Bacon, 1623/2005) dictate that mechanistic explanations like “rain falls because clouds form water vapor” are preferable to teleological ones like “rain falls so that plants should grow. Do people have preferences that naturally align with this? The predominant interpretation of past research is that they do...
Exposure to violence, which includes child abuse, neglect, witnessing domestic or community violence, crime, and sexual assault, is a national concern. Over the course of a year, 68% of children under age 17 are exposed to at least one form of violence (Finkelhor, Turner, Shattuck, & Hamby, 2015). Young children...
Although centrosomes nucleate and organize microtubules in mitotically-dividing cells, spindles in female reproductive cells (oocytes) form in their absence. In some organisms acentrosomal spindle assembly is mediated by acentriolar microtubule organizing centers (MTOCs) that are thought to functionally replace centrosomes. However, spindle assembly in human oocytes does not require MTOCs;...
ABSTRACT This dissertation moves work on school discipline into the digital era by filling a gap in the literature which has largely ignored how data from digital student ecosystems are mined and processed by school authority. My dissertation interrogates the role youth of youth online behavior in school discipline decision-making....