The Psychology of Transprejudice

In this thesis, I explored multiple predictors of transprejudice with the aim of understanding the relation between these varied psychological mechanisms and trans-related attitudes. In the first chapter of this thesis, I start with an overview of the literature on prejudice in general, and prejudice against transgender people specifically. I also provide a brief overview of the theories on gender. In the next chapter, I go on to summarise and reflect on the methodology used throughout this thesis. This is followed by four empirical chapters wherein I present 10 studies exploring the multiple predictors of transprejudice. Specifically, in Chapter 3 (3 studies, N = 146; N = 200; N = 245), I show that gender identity consciousness is an indirect predictor of transprejudice, mediated by greater gender identification and gender distinctiveness threat. In Chapter 4 (3 studies, N = 146; N = 199; N = 171), I illustrate that prior knowledge about and contact with transgender people predicts lower levels of transprejudice. In Chapter 5 (2 studies, N = 200; N = 205), I explore whether transgender essentialism moderates transprejudice depending on (1) age of trans selfidentification and (2) current age of the transgender person in question. Finally, in Chapter 6 (2 studies, N = 341; N = 391) I develop and validate a new scale to measure transprejudice. The thesis ends with a general discussion of the key findings of these 10 studies, the applied contributions that this research offers, and suggestions for future research avenues. <br/

VIA-SLAM:An Underwater Visual–Inertial–Acoustic SLAM With Integrated DVL

Article proposes a visual-inertial–acoustic SLAM (VIA-SLAM) for the localization of unmanned underwater vehicles (UUVs). The initialization of SLAM is a difficult task because of the slow-motion characteristics of UUVs and the challenging underwater environment with weak textures and low light conditions. The SLAM system integrates a Doppler velocity log (DVL), and we propose a DVL-assisted initialization method to enhance the accuracy of system initialization. The velocity measurements from the DVL are used to construct the DVL residuals, which is jointly optimized with the reprojection residuals and the inertial residuals to enhance the localization accuracy of the system. In addition, the reliability of visual information is affected by the complex underwater environment. To address the problem of decreased localization accuracy due to poor image quality, we propose an adaptive dynamic weight factor to assess the impact of image quality on localization performance and accordingly adjust the weight of visual information. Finally, we evaluate the proposed VIA-SLAM using the open underwater datasets and the data collected from actual lake trials. The experimental results show that our SLAM system significantly improves localization accuracy compared with the state-of-the-art methods

The vocabulary barrier in the General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE) in English Literature

Every year in the United Kingdom hundreds of thousands of pupils in their last year of secondary education take a General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE) exam in English Literature. Yet, every year, attainment is strikingly low: one quarter of those sitting the exam fail to achieve the grade 4 required for a standard pass. This paper sought to understand the reasons for this low attainment by comparing the vocabulary used in texts on the GCSE English Literature specifications with the vocabulary encountered in books that British teenagers read for pleasure. Our analysis shows that the GCSE texts have varied but dense vocabulary, and feature many words that are not encountered in popular books or in a typical spoken language environment. Many of these unfamiliar words are new roots whose meanings cannot be derived from their parts, suggesting that readers will need to rely on context or turn to a dictionary to interpret these. Together, our findings indicate that the GCSE texts will challenge even those pupils who read avidly in their free time, while their less able peers will be unable to access the texts. Our work suggests that a specification review is in order, and that it is critical that this review takes into account the wide variation in reading and language skills that pupils bring into the classroom

A Problem with the Current Methodology for Comparing Search Algorithms and a Proposed Solution

This paper explores how incompletely described tie-break policies can invalidate the experimental results reported in papers on optimal bidirectional heuristic search (BiHS). Experiments usually use a single implementation of an algorithm with its specific tie-break policy. When the tie-breaks are insufficiently described, we show that the results can be irreproducible, vary dramatically under different implementations, and lead to misleading assessments of an algorithm’s performance. To ensure reproducible and representative results, papers should either provide a description of the algorithm’s implementation, i.e., the complete tie-break policy, or alternatively, give results as a summary statistic representative of all possible tie-break implementations. We developed a software tool for this purpose