Rethinking the History of the Literary Symposium

published or submitted for publicatio

Behavioral approach and fear moderates the relationship between insensitive/intrusive parenting and early language development

Early language development has been implicated in a variety of other critical developmental outcomes making it important to understand contributors to the emergence of early language. Although still understudied, there is increasing recognition that children’s temperament and early parenting may be important factors in the emergence of early language. To add to this growing body of work, in the current investigation, two aspects of temperament, infant fearfulness, underpinned by the behavioral inhibition system, and approach, underpinned by the behavioral activation system (Schwartz et al., 1999), were examined in relation to language when children were 14 months of age. In addition, mother’s tendency to employ intrusive/insensitive parenting behaviors during play was examined as a contributor to child language, and was also examined in relation to child language in interaction with child behavioral inhibition and behavioral approach. The behavioral inhibition system (BIS) is the biopsychological system responsible for influencing an individual to withdraw from novel stimuli or situations. Based on prior work, it was expected that fear negatively, and approach positively associated with language. It also was expected that intrusive/insensitive parenting would be negatively related with child language. Although exploratory in nature, it was tentatively anticipated that stronger relations between intrusive/insensitive parenting and language would be observed for children high in fear, and high in approach (i.e., that intrusive/insensitive parenting would inhibit language in high approach children)

Identifying predictors of peritraumatic distress among 9-1-1 telecommunicators: the role of family violence and emotion regulation

Emergency responders have been underrepresented in the literature, though it has been noted that they experience greater amounts of distress than the general public. Greater distress has been found to increase the likelihood of developing psychopathology, such as PTSD, and so identifying predictors of distress may assist in decreasing the prevalence of PTSD. Past research has found that witnessing family violence in childhood and emotion dysregulation have been associated with higher amounts of peritraumatic distress. The current study looked to investigate 9-1-1 telecommunicators specifically, and thus it was hypothesized that, among 9-1-1 telecommunicators, emotion regulation difficulties would mediate the link between witnessing family violence in childhood and duty-related peritraumatic distress. Participants were recruited from around the country to complete an extensive survey that included measures of family violence, emotion regulation, and peritraumatic distress related to the participant's worst 9-1-1 call (N = 808). Analyses revealed that the hypothesized mediation model was not significant, although significant associations were found between emotion regulation difficulties and peritraumatic distress and between witnessing family violence and peritraumatic distress. Future research is needed to explore other predictors of peritraumatic distress among 9-1-1 telecommunicators, as greater duty-related distress enhances risk for other adverse outcomes, such as PTSD and depression.B.S. (Bachelor of Science

Space adaptive and hierarchical Bayesian variational models for image restoration

The main contribution of this thesis is the proposal of novel space-variant regularization or penalty terms motivated by a strong statistical rational. In light of the connection between the classical variational framework and the Bayesian formulation, we will focus on the design of highly flexible priors characterized by a large number of unknown parameters. The latter will be automatically estimated by setting up a hierarchical modeling framework, i.e. introducing informative or non-informative hyperpriors depending on the information at hand on the parameters. More specifically, in the first part of the thesis we will focus on the restoration of natural images, by introducing highly parametrized distribution to model the local behavior of the gradients in the image. The resulting regularizers hold the potential to adapt to the local smoothness, directionality and sparsity in the data. The estimation of the unknown parameters will be addressed by means of non-informative hyperpriors, namely uniform distributions over the parameter domain, thus leading to the classical Maximum Likelihood approach. In the second part of the thesis, we will address the problem of designing suitable penalty terms for the recovery of sparse signals. The space-variance in the proposed penalties, corresponding to a family of informative hyperpriors, namely generalized gamma hyperpriors, will follow directly from the assumption of the independence of the components in the signal. The study of the properties of the resulting energy functionals will thus lead to the introduction of two hybrid algorithms, aimed at combining the strong sparsity promotion characterizing non-convex penalty terms with the desirable guarantees of convex optimization

Genetics and Biochemistry of the Low Tannin Characteristic in Vicia faba L. and Development of a Molecular Marker for the zt2 Gene

Faba bean is a cool season grain legume which is grown in many areas of the world. It is used either as a food or feed and it has the highest concentration of protein in the seed compared to all the other pulses. The presence of condensed tannins (proanthocyanidins) in the testa of the seeds limits the use of faba bean both in the food and feed industries. Low tannin faba bean varieties are available for cultivation. The low tannin phenotype is controlled by two genes zt1 and zt2. Low tannin plants also have completely white flowers. The presence of either of the genes in the recessive form is sufficient for determining the low tannin and white flower phenotype. The main objective of this project was to develop and validate a molecular marker for the zt2 gene. A set of 875 SNP markers physically anchored to the genome of Medicago truncatula was used to genotype a RIL population at the F6 segregating for zt2. One of the SNP markers, located 10.5 cM from zt2, successfully discriminated the genotypes carrying the recessive (zt2) allele from those carrying the dominant (ZT2) allele. The SNP marker was then converted to KASP assay format. The second objective of this study was to test the available molecular tools for tagging the zt1 and zt2 genes for their efficacy in identifying the genotypes carrying the recessive alleles at both zt1 and zt2 loci. The F2:3 population segregating for both low tannin genes were used for this purpose. The KASP marker for the zt2 gene was again successful in distinguishing the recessive (zt2) allele from the dominant (ZT2) allele. For the zt1 gene we used two SCAR markers, SCG111171 and SCC5551 that are publicly available. Only SCC5551 was partially effective in tagging the zt1 gene. This marker in combination with the zt2 KASP marker may be used in future research aiming at the identification of the double recessive genotype zt1zt2. The third objective of the research was to analyze the phenolic profiles of the seed coats and flowers of three faba bean genotypes, one wild type and two low tannin lines recessive for either zt1 or zt2. For these analyses we used LC-MS techniques, covering over 100 known phenolic compounds. The results suggested a possible point of action of the zt genes in the flavonoid biosynthetic pathway. The results also showed clear differences in the phenolic profiles between the two low tannin lines both in the seed coats and the flowers. Furthermore, one unknown compound present in only one of the two low tannin lines was characterized, matching its MS/MS spectrum with that of a compound previously identified in another species. This and other compounds could be used as biochemical markers to distinguish the zt1 from the zt2 genotypes. In conclusion, this study enhanced our knowledge on the mode of action of the two low tannin genes zt1 and zt2, linking the results from molecular analysis with those at the biochemical level. The study successfully developed a molecular marker for the zt2 gene which could be used in combination with biochemical markers by plant breeders targeting the low tannin phenotype in their breeding programs

Workflow Provenance: from Modeling to Reporting

Workflow provenance is a crucial part of a workflow system as it enables data lineage analysis, error tracking, workflow monitoring, usage pattern discovery, and so on. Integrating provenance into a workflow system or modifying a workflow system to capture or analyze different provenance information is burdensome, requiring extensive development because provenance mechanisms rely heavily on the modelling, architecture, and design of the workflow system. Various tools and technologies exist for logging events in a software system. Unfortunately, logging tools and technologies are not designed for capturing and analyzing provenance information. Workflow provenance is not only about logging, but also about retrieving workflow related information from logs. In this work, we propose a taxonomy of provenance questions and guided by these questions, we created a workflow programming model 'ProvMod' with a supporting run-time library to provide automated provenance and log analysis for any workflow system. The design and provenance mechanism of ProvMod is based on recommendations from prominent research and is easy to integrate into any workflow system. ProvMod offers Neo4j graph database support to manage semi-structured heterogeneous JSON logs. The log structure is adaptable to any NoSQL technology. For each provenance question in our taxonomy, ProvMod provides the answer with data visualization using Neo4j and the ELK Stack. Besides analyzing performance from various angles, we demonstrate the ease of integration by integrating ProvMod with Apache Taverna and evaluate ProvMod usability by engaging users. Finally, we present two Software Engineering research cases (clone detection and architecture extraction) where our proposed model ProvMod and provenance questions taxonomy can be applied to discover meaningful insights