BYU ScholarsArchive (Brigham Young University)
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A Plain Exposition of Book of Mormon English by Means of Short Questions and Informed Answers
No full textBecause many questions have arisen regarding the discovery of real early modern influence in the dictated language of the Book of Mormon, some of these are considered and answered in this essay. The answers reflect insights from an exploration of the data that drove the conclusions published in previous papers. Numerous considerations independently indicate that the Book of Mormon was dictated in language that cannot be explained as a mere imitation of King James linguistic style, nor as Joseph Smith’s Yankee dialect. While the reasons for this and the processes that may have led to such results are open for debate, the implications of the data themselves cannot be lightly brushed aside
Creativity in Large Language Models
No full textAs artificial intelligence systems approach human-level performance across a wide variety of domains, creative domains remain a critical yet underexplored area of research. Unlike traditional AI tasks with well-defined objectives, creative tasks rely on inherently subjective measures, making them particularly challenging for machines that lack human experiential context. This dissertation establishes the fundamental importance of creativity in AI systems and presents methods for improving and evaluating the creative capabilities of LLMs on the pathway toward AGI. This work addresses and examines key limitations in current LLM creativity through model innovations, development frameworks, and comparative studies. The dissertation develops novel architectural approaches including an external knowledge integration mechanism inspired by human symbolic memory and black-box controllable text generation methods. Additionally, it presents a game-based development framework for creative agents and an automated knowledge extraction pipeline for story generation systems. Through comparative studies across multiple creative domains, this research provides empirical insights into the capabilities and limitations of LLMs in creative tasks. The work establishes evaluation frameworks for comparing general-purpose LLMs against traditional computational creativity systems and develops methods for assessing the effectiveness of various prompting techniques in creative text generation. These investigations show that LLM-generated creative artifacts are generally preferred over those from traditional CC systems, advanced prompting techniques (e.g., OPRO, chain-of-thought) do not significantly outperform basic prompting, and that LLM-based automatic evaluation is limited. Finally, this work reflects on the advantages and limitations of enhancing LLM creativity and provides directions for future work
Opposing Roles for Iron Transport Systems in Gallium Tolerance in Extraintestinal Pathogenic Escherichia Coli
No full textIron is required for bacterial growth because it serves as a co-factor for enzymes involved in DNA synthesis, cellular respiration, and other processes. Disrupting bacterial iron homeostasis is an effective strategy to prevent the growth of antibiotic-resistant bacteria, and gallium (Ga³⁺) has emerged as a promising candidate due to its ability to displace iron (Fe³⁺) and prevent essential iron-dependent pathways. However, Escherichia coli are naturally less sensitive to gallium than many other bacteria, and the mechanisms that control gallium tolerance are not completely understood. To address this, we performed a genome-wide transposon sequencing (TnSeq) screen to identify genes important for the survival of a pathogenic E. coli isolate (M12) in gallium nitrate. The TnSeq results indicated that inactivation of enterobactin siderophore-related genes (entS, fepD, ybeZ) enhances bacterial survival in gallium, while disrupting the ferric dicitrate transport system increases susceptibility. We validated these findings through targeted gene knockouts and gallium sensitivity experiments. Our findings suggest that enterobactin can complex with gallium for cellular uptake, but that the ferric citrate receptor FecA can discriminate between gallium citrate and iron citrate. Expression of fecA increased with gallium exposure, showing that gallium induces FecA-mediated iron uptake. Gallium also increased intracellular levels of manganese in the ΔfecA strain. Supplementation with iron or manganese restored growth of M12 ΔfecA in gallium, suggesting that gallium sensitivity is linked to both iron starvation and oxidative stress. As the ferric dicitrate transport system is an important virulence factor in several extraintestinal infection sites, our results suggest that targeting FecA may increase E. coli susceptibility to gallium while also suppressing virulence
How Nonreligious Parents Approach the (Non)Religious Socialization of Their Children
No full textDespite the rapid growth of nonreligious individuals in the United States, limited research has focused on how nonreligious parents approach the (non)religious socialization of their children. We employed a grounded theory approach to the analysis of in-depth interviews with 33 nonreligious couples (N = 66 parents), through which we identified five themes: (1) parents openly sharing their beliefs, (2) encouraging religious exploration, (3) emphasizing behaviors over beliefs, (4) concerns about religion, and (5) cultural and familial influences. By assessing the connections between the identified themes, we created a model that presents four distinct approaches to the (non)religious socialization of children that are based on how intentional nonreligious parents are in their efforts and how actively parents encourage religious exploration. Despite the differing approaches to (non)religious socialization, there was a strong consensus of the desired outcomes of these efforts. Implications for research and practice are offered
Young Children\u27s Responses to Socioeconomic Status in Peer Reward and Punishment
No full textThis research aimed to determine whether children\u27s understanding of socioeconomic status influences their tendency to reward or punish their peers. The experimenters used the dictator task to evaluate children\u27s (ages 7-8) assessments of hypothetical scenarios with participants punishing/rewarding poor and rich children. The results indicate no significant difference in punishment based on socioeconomic status, suggesting limited social class bias at this age
Review: Out of the Mouths of Babes: Infant Voices in Medieval French Literature
No full textVoicing a stirring call for readers to reconsider the silence and lacunae that are traditionally attributed to infancy, in her latest monograph, Julie Singer situates infancy as both an essential critical framework and an instructive, illuminative methodology through which a gaping archival silence can be rectified-that silence being literary representations of the medieval child, and specifically, the spoken life of the medieval child. As Singer argues, infancy and childhood entwine rather indiscernibly with each other in accordance with the medieval attribution of a longue dureé to infancy (Isidore of Seville, for instance, posited infancy as a stage lasting for about seven years past the moment of birth, Singer explains [2]). Tied as they are to the early stages of life and thus to a transitional, liminal phase of development, infancy and childhood typically connote transience, ephemerality, immaturity, unpredictability, irrationality, and even animality. As such, the coos, cries, murmurs, and wails that they yield are frequently understood to be little more than babble, in the true sense of the word, and consequently taken as unimportant or completely lacking in sincerity, regulation, seriousness, and importance. Or, since the inchoate sounds babes gurgle forth are presumed to signify nothing, they are often even more reductively taken as tantamount to a certain silence, since they do not transmit coherent verbal messages. Further challenging any percipience of productive, communicatively impactful infant speech, even notionally, \u27 child speech\u27 or \u27infant speech\u27 is a contradiction in terms, reflected in part by the very etymological significance of infant, from the Latin infans, meaning \u27unable to speak\u27 (2), which has traditionally abetted the categorization of child speech as inconsequential
リアホナから学ぶ実践的戦略２
No full textこの記事には、リアホナの記事から抽出されたデータを土台として、その約１０ページほどを２通りに処理しました。１つ目は、５つの原則にまとめ、それについての解説をすることで、２つ目は、その解説をより具体的にするため、アクションプランを作ることでした。もともとのデータは日本文で３５０ページを超えていたので、ここにまとめられたセットは、全部で３７種類にもなりました。面白いのは、もちろん重複する考えが出てくるのは当然ですが、次から次へと興味深い視点が出てくるので、３７種類のセット（このドキュメントにはその一部だけが含まれる）の全部に、繰り返し目を通していただくようにお勧めします。霊的な成長を育むための、飛躍につながる限りないヒントがあちこちに潜んでいることに気づかれるでしょう。この４５ページの記事には宝物が詰まっています。最後の方には、ズームアウトの仕方、「啓示ノート」の工夫の仕方、モロナイ司令長官の戦略に倣って誘惑に立ち向かう、マルタからマリアへの視点の変更の仕方などの短い記事も入っています
