Does Faux Pas Detection in Adult Autism Reflect Differences in Social Cognition or Decision-Making Abilities?

43 typically-developed adults and 35 adults with ASD performed a cartoon faux pas test. Adults with ASD apparently over-detected faux pas despite good comprehension abilities, and were generally slower at responding. Signal detection analysis demonstrated that the ASD participants had significantly greater difficulty detecting whether a cartoon depicted a faux pas and showed a liberal response bias. Test item analysis demonstrated that the ASD group were not in agreement with a reference control group (n = 69) about which non-faux pas items were most difficult. These results suggest that the participants with ASD had a primary problem with faux pas detection, but that there is another factor at work, possibly compensatory, that relates to their choice of a liberal response criterion

She Makes a Beast of Man, a Martyr of Woman: Absinthe in France, 1908-1922

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Social Studies of Bard College

Reading Books and Reading Minds: Differential Effects of Wonder and The Crossover on Empathy and Theory of Mind

We tested sixth graders for empathy and theory of mind before and after an academic unit on either Wonder or The Crossover. Wonder was associated with improved perspective-taking; students who read The Crossover increased in concern for others. Faux pas detection increased in both genders with Wonder, and in girls with The Crossover. Students who read The Crossover in print showed improved understanding of facial expressions, while students who used iPads declined. Young adult fiction is associated with improved social cognitive skills, but effects depend on gender and reading format, as well as on the choice of individual book

Holograms: The story of a word and its cultural uses

Holograms reached popular consciousness during the 1960s and have since left audiences alternately fascinated, bemused or inspired. Their impact was conditioned by earlier cultural associations and successive reimaginings by wider publics. Attaining peak public visibility during the 1980s, holograms have been found more in our pockets (as identity documents) and in our minds (as video-gaming fantasies and “faux hologram” performers) than in front of our eyes. The most enduring, popular interpretations of the word “hologram” evoke the traditional allure of magic and galvanize hopeful technological dreams. This article explores the mutating cultural uses of the term “hologram” as marker of magic, modernity and optimism

Strain distribution in quantum dot of arbitrary polyhedral shape: Analytical solution in closed form

An analytical expression of the strain distribution due to lattice mismatch is obtained in an infinite isotropic elastic medium (a matrix) with a three-dimensional polyhedron-shaped inclusion (a quantum dot). The expression was obtained utilizing the analogy between electrostatic and elastic theory problems. The main idea lies in similarity of behavior of point charge electric field and the strain field induced by point inclusion in the matrix. This opens a way to simplify the structure of the expression for the strain tensor. In the solution, the strain distribution consists of contributions related to faces and edges of the inclusion. A contribution of each face is proportional to the solid angle at which the face is seen from the point where the strain is calculated. A contribution of an edge is proportional to the electrostatic potential which would be induced by this edge if it is charged with a constant linear charge density. The solution is valid for the case of inclusion having the same elastic constants as the matrix. Our method can be applied also to the case of semi-infinite matrix with a free surface. Three particular cases of the general solution are considered--for inclusions of pyramidal, truncated pyramidal, and "hut-cluster" shape. In these cases considerable simplification was achieved in comparison with previously published solutions. A generalization of the obtained solution to the case of anisotropic media is discussed.Comment: revtex4, 12 pages, 6 figures; Ch. II rewritten, new Ch. V added, errors in Eq.(13) and Eq.(22) fixe

From holism to compositionality: memes and the evolution of segmentation, syntax, and signification in music and language

Steven Mithen argues that language evolved from an antecedent he terms “Hmmmmm, [meaning it was] Holistic, manipulative, multi-modal, musical and mimetic”. Owing to certain innate and learned factors, a capacity for segmentation and cross-stream mapping in early Homo sapiens broke the continuous line of Hmmmmm, creating discrete replicated units which, with the initial support of Hmmmmm, eventually became the semantically freighted words of modern language. That which remained after what was a bifurcation of Hmmmmm arguably survived as music, existing as a sound stream segmented into discrete units, although one without the explicit and relatively fixed semantic content of language. All three types of utterance – the parent Hmmmmm, language, and music – are amenable to a memetic interpretation which applies Universal Darwinism to what are understood as language and musical memes. On the basis of Peter Carruthers’ distinction between ‘cognitivism’ and ‘communicativism’ in language, and William Calvin’s theories of cortical information encoding, a framework is hypothesized for the semantic and syntactic associations between, on the one hand, the sonic patterns of language memes (‘lexemes’) and of musical memes (‘musemes’) and, on the other hand, ‘mentalese’ conceptual structures, in Chomsky’s ‘Logical Form’ (LF)

Faux Queens: an exploration of gender, sexuality and queerness in cis-female drag queen performance

This research explores the cultural implications of cis-women performing as drag queens; focusing on straight-identified performers.The exegesis and creative production examine intersections between heterosexual and queer identities, and whether straight-identified faux queens may be queered by performance practice. Drawing on practice-led research, autoethnography and in-depth interviews, the thesis explores challenges in negotiating cis-gender iterations of drag and discusses ways that faux queen performances maintain the challenge of queer and resist reincorporation

4D, N = 1 Supersymmetry Genomics (I)

Presented in this paper the nature of the supersymmetrical representation theory behind 4D, N = 1 theories, as described by component fields, is investigated using the tools of Adinkras and Garden Algebras. A survey of familiar matter multiplets using these techniques reveals they are described by two fundamental valise Adinkras that are given the names of the cis-Valise (c-V) and the trans-Valise (t-V). A conjecture is made that all off-shell 4D, N = 1 component descriptions of supermultiplets are associated with two integers - the numbers of c-V and t-V Adinkras that occur in the representation.Comment: 53 pages, 19 figures, Report-II of SSTPRS 2008 Added another chapter for clarificatio