6609 research outputs found
Sort by
Podcast for Parents: Learning to Learn From Mistakes
No full textDr. Maleka Donaldson, parent, teacher, education professor and author of “From Oops to Aha: Portraits of Learning From Mistakes in Kindergarten,” shares her vast experiences for parents’ consideration. Children at all ages are reading cues concerning the acceptance of mistakes. As parents, we need to be aware of the message we are communicating. How have our past experiences influenced our unconscious responses
Population Modeling with Machine Learning can Enhance Measures of Mental Health - Open-Data Replication
Get PDFEfforts to predict trait phenotypes based on functional MRI data from large cohorts have been hampered by low prediction accuracy and/or small effect sizes. Although these findings are highly replicable, the small effect sizes are somewhat surprising given the presumed brain basis of phenotypic traits such as neuroticism and fluid intelligence. We aim to replicate previous work and additionally test multiple data manipulations that may improve prediction accuracy by addressing data pollution challenges. Specifically, we added additional fMRI features, averaged the target phenotype across multiple measurements to obtain more accurate estimates of the underlying trait, balanced the target phenotype\u27s distribution through undersampling of majority scores, and identified data-driven subtypes to investigate the impact of between-participant heterogeneity. Our results replicated prior results from Dadi et al. (2021) in a larger sample. Each data manipulation further led to small but consistent improvements in prediction accuracy, which were largely additive when combining multiple data manipulations. Combining data manipulations (i.e., extended fMRI features, averaged target phenotype, balanced target phenotype distribution) led to a three-fold increase in prediction accuracy for fluid intelligence compared to prior work. These findings highlight the benefit of several relatively easy and low-cost data manipulations, which may positively impact future work
Public Feminisms: From Academy to Community
Get PDFThe field of feminist studies grew from the U.S. women’s movements of the 1960s and 1970s and has continued to be deeply connected to ongoing movements for social justice. As educational institutions are increasingly seeing public scholarship and community engagement as relevant and fruitful complements to traditional academic work, feminist scholars have much to offer in demonstrating different ways to inform and interact with various communities. In this collection, a diverse range of feminist scholar-activists write about the dynamic and varied methods they use to reach beyond traditional classrooms and scholarly journals to share their work with the public. Here is an opportunity to reflect on the meaning and importance of community engagement and to archive some of the important public-facing work feminists are doing today. Faculty, graduate, and undergraduate students, as well as administrators hoping to increase their schools’ connections to the community, will find this volume indispensable.
“In Public Feminisms, Baker and Dove-Viebahn have curated a vibrantly intersectional collection of essays that speak both to the longstanding commitment of feminisms to education and activism and the urgent need for this work in the contemporary moment. This book shows how scholar-activists are bringing together knowledge production and the sharing of that knowledge and community engagement through a series of compelling case studies. I can’t wait to teach it.” —Carol A. Stabile, Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at University of Oregon
Carrie N. Baker is the Sylvia Dlugasch Baumann professor in American Studies and a professor in the Program for the Study of Women and Gender at Smith College. Aviva Dove-Viebahn is Assistant Professor of Film and Media Studies at Arizona State University.https://scholarworks.smith.edu/textbooks/1004/thumbnail.jp
Institutional Design and Policy Responsiveness in US States
Get PDFThere is significant disagreement on the moderating role of institutions on policy responsive- ness, yet overwhelmingly research in state politics has focused on single institutions. This project leverages a new aggregate scale of state institutions to evaluate if the collective insti- tutional context moderates the influence of public opinion on policy. I use a recently released latent scale of institutional context and find that high levels of accountability pressure strongly strengthen public opinion’s influence on policy for both economic and social policy, while the strength of a state’s checks and balance system is largely unrelated to policy responsiveness. These results demonstrate the importance of incorporating aggregate institutional design into our understanding of the role of institutions in state politics, and that collectively institutions play a large role in determining how public opinion is translated into policy
Visualizing Spaces of Non-Place in Japanese-Brazilian Film and Television
No full textIn 1888, Brazil became the last country in the Western Hemisphere to abolish slavery. This prompted a bilateral agreement to satisfy the country’s post-abolition labor shortage with Japanese migrant workers. Today, Brazil is home to the largest Japanese diaspora in the world. This study examines representations of this diaspora in 20th and 21st century Japanese-Brazilian film and television. I treat this corpus as a form of ‘visual testimony,’ as elaborated by Brazilianist Ana Paulina Lee, to find evidence of sentiments and meaning that elude the written word. My media analysis examines how motion pictures visualize permanent conditions of non-place and liminality to describe diasporic experience beyond what can be articulated in a colonial lexicon. I also focus on the spatial materiality and mise en scène of the medium itself. I analyze how set designers dress these spaces of non-place to portray the states of liminality inhabited by São Paulo’s Japanese-Brazilian community. I find that these cultural productions visually enact the desire to return home by displaying Japanese difference in the Brazilian context. A condition of non-place or permanent liminality manifests through the affect of these visual narratives–that is, a state evoked emotionally in reaction to the community’s displacement and marginalization. This state of transience can paradoxically linger permanently, raising questions of how to visualize belonging to a non-place, to a Japanese space, to a Brazilian space and to the indivisibility of these in cultural productions
Hamiltonian Truncation in Quantum Mechanics and Quantum Field Theory
No full textQuantum mechanics and quantum field theory are fundamental frameworks of modern theoretical physics. Since their development in the early 20th century, physicists have long taken endeavors to use those frameworks to better describe our known physical universe. Many theories have been proposed and are awaiting confirmation, but their complex mathematical structures have hindered quick comparison with experiments. Thus a new movement in theoretical physics was embarked on, to develop methods to study complicated theories more accurately and faster and to yield accurate theoretical predictions to be directly tested against experimental data. Hamiltonian truncation (HT) is a product of this crucial movement and a methodology developed to complement more traditional methods used in quantum mechanics and quantum field theory. This Thesis is an exploration of this relatively new method and an attempt to apply this method to the study of scattering processes, for which it has been rarely employed to this date. This Thesis focuses on implementing HT in quantum mechanics, specifically, in onedimensional quantum mechanics and two-dimensional supersymmetric quantum mechanics. Following the procedure developed by Balthazar et al. [1], we numerically compute Hamiltonian matrices and use their eigenvalues to approximate scattering phase functions. We then analyze the spectrum, decay width, and lifetime of metastable states (resonances) and assess the effectiveness of HT in terms of the parameter L, the IR cutoff. For supersymmetric quantum mechanics, we confirm that our implementation of HT successfully reproduces the results by Balthazar et al. [1]. This Thesis lays the groundwork for future projects on HT that aim to implement the method in various quantum systems and to study more sophisticated scattering processes such as large multiparticle production in scalar quantum field theory
Ultrafast Dynamics of Photosynthetic Light Harvesting: Strategies for Acclimation Across Organisms
Get PDFPhotosynthetic light harvesting exhibits near-unity quantum efficiency. The high efficiency is achieved through a series of energy and charge transfer steps within a network of pigment-containing proteins. Remarkably, high efficiency is conserved across many organisms despite differences in the protein structures and organization that allow each organism to respond to its own biological niche and the stressors within. In this review, we highlight recent progress toward understanding how organisms maintain optimal light-harvesting ability by acclimating to their environment. First, we review the building blocks of photosynthetic light harvesting, energy transfer, and time-resolved spectroscopic techniques. Then, we explore how three classes of photosynthetic organisms—purple bacteria, cyanobacteria, and green plants—optimize their light-harvesting apparatuses to their particular environment. Overall, research has shown that photosynthetic energy transfer is robust to changing environmental conditions, with each organism utilizing its own strategies to optimize photon capture in its particular biological niche
A Snapshot into the Lives of Elephants: Camera Traps and Conservation in Etosha National Park, Namibia
Get PDFKnowledge of elephant movement and grouping patterns in the wild is critical for their management and conservation. Much of these data come from GPS collar data and aerial surveys, which have provided invaluable information, but data from these methods are often limited to small groups or entire populations. Effective elephant management requires both generalized and localized methodologies. Here, we propose the expanded use of camera traps in research relating to elephant localized movements and grouping patterns as an additional tool for elephant conservation management. In this study, we use a battery-powered camera trap to provide daily high-resolution data of African savanna elephant (Loxodonta africana) grouping patterns over the course of an entire year. We present findings on the seasonal and diurnal grouping patterns of elephants at a waterhole in the northeast corner of Etosha National Park from July 2016 to June 2017. The frequency of elephant occurrences varied seasonally and diurnally across all group types (solitary male, male, family, and mixed groups), while group sizes did not vary seasonally, except for male groups. Solitary males occurred relatively equally throughout the day, while male and mixed groups occurred the most midday, and family groups occurred the most in the afternoon. Additionally, we measured the reliability of research assistants when collecting group type and group size data from the camera trap images. Intra- and inter-observer reliability was excellent among and across research assistants, highlighting the potential for non-specialist observers to have greater involvement in camera trap data collection. Our results support the use of camera trap data where GPS collars and aerial surveys are not feasible and where higher-resolution data are needed for more localized management. Finally, we discuss our experience with two different types of camera traps to highlight the pros and cons of each approach
Fat Stories
Get PDFThe Contemporary Reader of Gender and Fat Studies is a key reference work in contemporary scholarship situated at the intersection between Gender and Fat Studies, charting the connections and tensions between these two fields.
Comprising over 20 chapters from a range of diverse and international contributors, the Reader is structured around the following key themes: theorizing gender and fat; narrating gender and fat; historicizing gender and fat; institutions and public policy; health and medicine; popular culture and media; and resistance. It is an intersectional collection, highlighting the ways that gender and fat always exist in connection with multiple other structures, forms of oppression, and identities, including race, ethnicity, sexualities, age, nationalities, disabilities, religion, and class.
The Contemporary Reader of Gender and Fat Studies is essential reading for scholars and advanced students in Gender Studies, Sexuality Studies, Sociology, Body Studies, Cultural Studies, Psychology, and Health.https://scholarworks.smith.edu/eng_books/1018/thumbnail.jp