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Who Is It?: Vowel Sound Variation Among African American and European American Children
No full textPrevious research conducted by Peterson and Barney (1952) has shown vowels are acoustically specified based on their formant frequencies. Their study has been replicated and extended to include temporal and spectral measurements (Hillenbrand et al., 1995). While both of these studies included children, neither included data in respect to the child’s gender or ethnicity. Therefore, more data is needed that provides the acoustic targets for children that take age, gender, and ethnicity into consideration. The present study explores variations in phonemic production across age, gender, and ethnicity. There is a gradual lowering of the voice beginning with the onset of puberty, which could begin as early as age 10 (Berger, 2008). The fundamental frequency of a child’s voice lowers as well, influencing the phonological space, which could result in differences across gender especially for the 11 to 12 year olds. Children were presented with a list containing neutral consonantal context /h-vowel-d/ words and a second list containing sentence-length stimuli. The /hVd/ words contained each of the 12 General American English vowels as well as three diphthongs for a total of 30 utterances per speaker. We hypothesize that fundamental and formant frequencies will be higher for 8- to 9-year olds than for 10- to 12-year olds and higher for girls (by age 10). With respect to ethnicity, we anticipate no significant differences in frequency measures between European-American and African-American children. This study will contribute to our knowledge of developmental trajectories for specified acoustic parameters. As gender and ethnicity are vital cues for adult speakers, it is important to investigate how salient acoustic parameters are for child speakers and at what ages child parameters begin to approximate adult measures. Results will have implications for audiologists, speech language pathologists, developmental scientists, and others in the field of communication sciences and disorders
Development of a Low-Cost, Rapid Screening Method to Measure Per- and Polyfluoroalkyl Substances in Groundwater
No full textBecause of the environmental persistence of per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFASs), their ability to bioaccumulate, and their suspected human toxicity, new methods to identify these chemicals at trace levels in groundwater are needed. Particle induced gamma-ray emission (PIGE) spectroscopy is an established ion beam analysis technique that has been used to quantitatively measure light elements in diverse target materials. PIGE utilizes a beam of accelerated protons to excite 19F nuclei on the surface of a target. As these nuclei return to their ground state, they emit characteristic gamma-rays that can be used to quantify the total fluorine concentrations in a sample. An in-air PIGE method has been developed and is shown to be an effective tool to determine the presence or absence of PFASs extracted from groundwater samples. Solutions of perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA) were extracted onto the surface of a weak anion exchange solid-phase extraction (SPE) column, and the total fluorine measured on this column by PIGE correlates well with the initial PFOA concentrations. Subsequent experiments with actual groundwater samples demonstrate PIGE to be an inexpensive, rapid, and non-destructive method for total fluorine analysis, which can be adapted to detect environmentally relevant PFASs concentrations in groundwater
The Influence of Religion on College Campus Crime
No full textThe feeling of safety on college campuses is an important aspect to millennial college students. According to the Student Poll, which surveys college students in the United States, seventy percent of 2007 college freshman view the safety on campus as an important factor in deciding which college to attend. In this research, I explore whether religious affiliated institutions have lower campus crime than nonreligious affiliated institutions. If criminal behaviors are the result of rational choices, how much does religious influence increase the cost of crime to decrease these choices? The Office of Postsecondary Education (OPE) provides campus safety and security panel data on the number of violent and property crimes on each U.S. college campus. Merging these crime statistics with detailed school characteristics from the Integrated Postsecondary Educational Data System (IPEDS), this research will identify colleges with a religious affiliation and examine the relationship between campus crime and religion
Assigning and Testing Function from Structure of Uncharacterized Proteins
No full textIn 2000, the National Institutes of Health initiated the Protein Structure Initiative as a multi-center structural biology program with “an initial goal to make the three-dimensional, atomic-level structures of most proteins easily obtainable from knowledge of their corresponding DNA sequences.” (NIGMS website). The third and final phase of this program concluded in 2015 with the publication and distribution of more than 5000 previously uncharacterized proteins. The work described here leverages the availability of high-quality structures and pre-cloned expression plasmids to combine forces of undergraduate biochemistry teaching lab courses across a diverse range of participating institutions. This consortium of undergraduate biochemistry faculty and students seeks to identify functional properties of a subset of these uncharacterized proteins, seeking to unify structure-and-function relationships. The current biochemistry laboratory class at Hope College has expressed and purified seven of these proteins, finding that structural information can guide, although not predict entirely, functional predictions regarding substrate specificity
Janelle Monáe; The Ultimate Space Maker
No full textIn 2015 Viola Davis became the first Black woman to ever win an Emmy for best actress in a drama. In her acceptance speech she said, “The only thing that separates women of color from anyone else is opportunity. You cannot win an Emmy for roles that are simply not there” (Davis). R&B singer and record label owner Janelle Monáe is dedicating her career to creating roles for women in all areas of the music industry. Looking through a Black feminist lens I will examine Monáe’s life works, whether they be her works as an artist or her works as a businesswoman. It is my argument that through her ability to create space and opportunity for Black women in the music industry, Janelle Monáe is a prime example of modern day Black feminism. Given that so much of Monáe’s artistic works fit into the genre of Afrofuturism my findings will be presented not in the form of a paper or a poster, but through a completely modern, interactive website. Presenting my findings in such a manner creates more of an experience for those who view it while giving a nod to the artistic aesthetic Monáe herself employs
Correlation Between a Nation’s Human Trafficking Rates and Socioeconomic Status
No full textOur data and literature gathered was focused on answering the thesis question, “Does a country’s socioeconomic status affect its human trafficking rates?” While literature was rather abundant, raw statistics were scarce. This was due to the illegal nature of human trafficking, which therefore leads to very little official documentation of those caught in it. Despite posing a problem originally, progress was made in gathering reliable data. After collecting and verifying the information and numbers found, the data corresponding to each country was paired against its GDP per capita—the measure of the average income per person in a country. All 12 countries selected at random were represented graphically to show the distinct trend between low GDP per capita and high human trafficking rates. While poverty is not the sole causation of human trafficking, the information gathered showed that it had a strong correlation to high human trafficking rates
Understanding Firewalld in Multi-Zone Configurations
Get PDFStories of compromised servers and data theft fill today\u27s news. It isn\u27t difficult for someone who has read an informative blog post to access a system via a misconfigured service, take advantage of a recently exposed vulnerability, or gain control using a stolen password. Any of the many internet services found on a typical Linux server could harbor a vulnerability that grants unauthorized access to the system.
Since it\u27s an impossible task to harden a system at the application level against every possible threat, firewalls provide security by limiting access to a system. Firewalls filter incoming packets based on their IP of origin, their destination port, and their protocol. This way, only a few IP/port/protocol combinations interact with the system, and the rest do not.
Linux firewalls are handled by netfilter, which is a kernel level framework. For over a decade, iptables has provided the userland abstraction layer for netfilter. Iptables subjects packets to a gauntlet of rules where, if the IP/port/protocol combination of the rule matches the packet, the rule is applied causing the packet to be accepted, rejected, or dropped.
Firewalld is a newer userland abstraction layer for netfilter. Unfortunately, its power and flexibility are underappreciated due to a lack of documentation describing multi-zoned configurations. This article provides examples to remedy this situation
Adaptive Regulation Strategies in Response to Transgression Rumination: Analysis of Written Responses Following Acceptance or Reappraisal Training
No full textInterpersonal offenses carry negative consequences associated with rumination. Two adaptive regulation strategies—reappraisal and acceptance—have demonstrated positive impacts (Wolgast, Lundh, & Viborg, 2011). One study (Witvliet, Knoll, Hinman, & DeYoung, 2010) found that compassion-focused reappraisal stimulated empathy and forgiveness, whereas benefit-focused reappraisal prompted gratitude. Yet, reappraisal may be more difficult to implement than acceptance. In this study, we evaluated the impact of brief reappraisal and acceptance interventions on participants’ written responses. Undergraduates (N=92) identified an interpersonal transgression experienced in the past three years. Participants ruminated and were randomly assigned to either positive reappraisal, acceptance, or control (a second trial of rumination) imagery conditions. Participants then wrote about their imagery experience. One week later, participants re-engaged the imagery conditions. Linguistic analyses showed main effects of trial type: in the initial visit, participants used more forgiving and cost language during the intervention compared to initial rumination (ps \u3c 0.019); a similar pattern occurred during the second visit with cost language (p \u3c 0.001). A main effect of trial occurred during the second visit, with participants using more anxious language during rumination (p = 0.009). A significant trial × condition interaction effect was found for benefit language during both visits (ps \u3c 0.03). Confidence interval comparisons revealed that reappraisal prompted more benefit-finding language than rumination during the intervention; additionally, only reappraisers increased their use of benefit-finding language across trials. Overall, participants used more forgiving language and less negative (cost-focused, anxious) language during the intervention trial, compared to rumination. Only participants in the reappraisal condition had an increase in benefit-focused language during the intervention trial. This suggests that the reappraisal condition was more effective than the acceptance or control conditions for promoting benefit-focused language, which past research has linked with increased gratitude