Changing Gears – Page 8 – UROP Spring Symposium 2021

Changing Gears

Methods of exploring the effects of verb causativity on reaction time

Our research focuses on methods of studying how causativity of verbs affect our processing of them and therefore our reaction time, and how these reaction time effects can be isolated from other sentence processing effects like general lexical prediction. In a previous study conducted by Dr. Levinson, it was found that there is an added level of complexity in transitive variants of causative verbs as compared to transitive variants of non-causative, or activity, verbs. This was concluded by measuring reaction times in self-paced reading tasks of sentences with verbs of transitive and intransitive, as well as causative and non-causative variants. For example, a causative transitive verb appears in the sentence “The sun melted the ice”, whereas an example of a causative intransitive verb appears in the sentence “The ice melted”, which differs from an activity verb, such as “ate”. The complexity of causative verbs vs. non-causative verbs is something that has long been debated, and helps to better understand linguistic processing. Our research mainly focused on using different methods of studying this causativity phenomenon other than self-paced reading tasks, as well as determining the best methods for disentangling verb representations from lexical confounds.

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Impact of School Policy Change on School Enrollment: Evidence from Mozambique

Enrollment in primary and secondary education in Sub Saharan Africa has lagged behind much of the rest of the world. Amongst numerous potential reasons, the fees to attend school is often considered a prohibitive barrier in accessing public education. In 2018, the government of Mozambique introduced legislation abolishing the fees for school enrollment in grades corresponding to the school-ages of 6 to 12. Previously on average, the fee for primary school is 21,410 meticas ($354 USD) per child per year for grades 1 to 5 and Mt 60,013 ($992 USD) per child per year for grades 6 and 7. This study explores the efficacy of this policy change and its external validity with respect to education in Sub-Saharan Africa.

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“What are you laughing at?” Cross cultural investigation into international Chinese students’ understanding of US minority group humor

Listening courses in graduate EAP curricula typically focus on academic listening, such as in lectures and seminars (Flowerdew 1995). However, much listening occurs outside of the classroom, with students frequently expressing frustration at not being able to understand or participate in peer conversations about cultural issues such as current topics and humor. To expose international students to diverse voices and content in a non-academic listening course, we utilized examples of US minority group humor, Key and Peele videos, from the Chinese media platform Bilibil. We present our first findings from small listening groups discussing one Key and Peele video, showing that students draw on home culture interpretations when encountering unfamiliar US culture and humor. Chinese students specifically are using an internet practice already familiar to them, live commenting (Danmu), as a tool to deepen their understanding of English, general US culture and minority group culture. We hope to create materials for the new culture class by evaluating students’ depth of understanding of important current aspects of US (minority) culture.

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Is sympatric speciation more important in the ocean?

In evolutionary biology, the importance of geographical isolation and allopatric speciation has been emphasized for several decades. However, different from the terrestrial environment, there is no such absolute geographical barrier in the ocean because most marine species, even larvae, can easily disperse great distances due to its mobility and the ocean current. More sympatric speciation is expected in marine species since allopatric speciation is hard to realize in the ocean. This project mainly focuses on evaluating the importance of sympatric speciation in the ocean through analyzing the dataset that we created. The sympatric speciation requires range overlap rather than isolation. The importance of sympatry is evaluated by examining the range overlap among sister species in the ocean. Phylogenetic trees are constructed based on both morphological (i.e. character matrix) and genetic information (e.g. DNA sequences) using the Principle of Parsimony. Complete phylogenies and evolutionary tree of marine species are useful to identify the existing sister species pairs. Additionally, phylogenies are collected from articles published on academic journals and are selected based on its consistency with WoRMS. (World Register of Marine Species) Biogeographic data records the living range of existing species. Combining that with identified sister species pairs, the range overlap of certain marine sister pairs can be determined, and the pattern of sympatry is expected to be recognized. The result are compared with the importance of sympatry of terrestrial organisms to emphasize the significant role of sympatry in the ocean.

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Coronary artery segmentation for automatic stenosis detection

One type of coronary artery disease (CAD), stenosis, is characterized by the narrowing of the coronary arteries, which is the leading cause of death in the United States. One of the most popular ways to diagnose stenosis is the coronary angiogram, from which a doctor can diagnose stenosis by finding places of narrowing in the arteries with the video or the pictures acquired. A lot of studies are currently focusing on automatic coronary artery segmentation, a critical step of a computer-aided system that assists doctors in detecting coronary stenosis. Here we propose a deep learning pipeline using DenseNet-backbone U-Net for coronary artery segmentation in angiogram images, which could be combined with pre-processing and post-processing steps for stenosis detection.

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Data Gathering Data Analysis Toward Better Air Quality Outcomes in SW Detroit

In support of the ongoing initiatives by community advocates to cut diesel emissions in Southwest Detroit, this research aims to gauge the effects on air quality that commercial vehicles have in residential areas when using their streets as routes. SW Detroit has some of the highest levels of PM and toxic pollutants measured in Detroit, with Detroit having the worst air quality conditions in Michigan. This study accesses the ambient air quality in residential areas that have a high frequency of commercial trucks traveling their streets. We want to know how each passing truck contributes to the air pollution on the street it is using.

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A Review of People’s Perceptions of COVID-19 and Adherence to Public Health Policy

From early 2020 to 2021, the unprecedented outbreak of novel coronavirus (COVID-19) in Wuhan has evolved into a pandemic. As coronavirus impacted people’s daily life, public transportation and recreational facilities worldwide, countries implemented various public health guidelines to help their cities recover from the virus attack. To understand international differences and similarities in people’s thoughts about the novel coronavirus and associated public health guidelines, I conducted a literature review to examine: 1) people’s perceptions of the coronavirus; 2) people’s adherence to public health policies (e.g., face masks, social distancing, and hand hygiene); and 3) potential reasons for the differences (e.g., cultural beliefs). I reviewed research articles related to the effectiveness of general public health guidelines in major countries in North America, Europe and Asia (e.g., the U.S, U.K., and China respectively) and the opinions of residents regarding the current rules they need to follow. My findings indicate that even though residents in eastern and western nations share basic knowledge about the coronavirus, people from western countries still have some misconceptions about the coronavirus. If people are more optimistic, they are more willing to adhere to public health policies. Based on these findings, future research can focus on the development of new tailored strategies to combat transmission of the coronavirus, such as raising people’s awareness.

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