Structural equation modeling of health belief model influences on exercise behavior among medical center employees

This investigation had two purposes. First, the study was designed to confirm the factor structure of the Health Belief Model Inventory (HBMI) among employees of a medical center. Second, a causal model was developed and tested using HBMI components to predict exercise behavior;Data were collected from 511 employees of a regional medical center. Analysis of the data included (1) confirmatory factor analysis of the proposed model including benefits, barriers, susceptibility, social influences, cues to action, and perceived physical ability. (2) structural equation modeling of the relationship between these factors and exercise behavior;Confirmatory factor analysis of the HBMI revealed relatively stable factor structure for benefits, susceptibility, social influences, cues to action, and perceived physical ability. Barriers was somewhat less unidimensional and, although the goodness of fit was improved by trimming some items, it continued to be the poorest fitting factor in the model;The structural equation modeling of exercise behavior used the HBMI constructs as predictors and minutes per week and weeks of exercise as indicators in a multiple indicators-multiple causes analysis. Susceptibility was negatively associated with exercise behavior while Cues to Action and Perceived Physical Ability were positively associated. Benefits, Barriers, and Social Influences were nonsignificant in their contributions to the model;When high exertion subjects were compared with low exertion subjects, some differences emerged. The high exertion group displayed negative path coefficients for Susceptibility and positive coefficients for Cues to Action and Perceived Physical Ability. The low exertion group displayed negative path coefficients for Susceptibility and Social Influences and a positive coefficient for Cues to Action;Results of this study substantiate the addition of Perceived Physical Ability as a component of the model, at least among high exertion subjects. This model\u27s overall ability to predict exercise behavior was substantially less than that achieved in a previous application of the HBMI instrument used in this study

Imagining International Justice in Post-Genocide Cambodia (abstract)

Through an innovative student-faculty collaborative research externship program supported by the Ohio University Center for Law, Justice & Culture, several undergraduate students spent the summer of 2014 in Cambodia conducting independent ethnographic research on issues of law, memory, and justice in the aftermath of the Khmer Rouge genocide. Utilizing the students’ research in Cambodia, this proposed panel session presents three case studies for a conversation regarding how ethnographic methods can inform transitional justice mechanisms by emphasizing local experiences. Much of the research is in light of the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC), a hybrid tribunal that began in 2007 to try senior leaders of the Khmer Rouge and those deemed most responsible for crimes committed between 1975 and 1979. Collectively, the projects explore connections between international justice and contemporary Cambodian society, including how international justice mechanisms produce global legal consciousness, how this consciousness is claimed and contested by local actors, and how legal categories shape collective identity, memories of the past, and imaginations of the future. The research projects reveal a spectrum of issues related to law, memory, and justice. One of the projects discusses the politics of the word “genocide” as it is used in the Cambodian case, drawing upon the experiences and perceptions of the Cham Muslim minority and Case 002/02 of the ECCC. Another project explores representations of victimhood at the Tuol Sleng Museum of Genocidal Crimes as they manifest in debates surrounding a new, ECCC reparations-related memorial on the site. The last project investigates the politics of the cultural production, representation, and translation in genocide exhibitions at three contrasting memorial museums across Cambodia

The vectorization of a ray tracing program for image generation

Ray tracing is a widely used method for producing realistic computer generated images. Ray tracing involves firing an imaginary ray from a view point, through a point on an image plane, into a three dimensional scene. The intersections of the ray with the objects in the scene determines what is visible at the point on the image plane. This process must be repeated many times, once for each point (commonly called a pixel) in the image plane. A typical image contains more than a million pixels making this process computationally expensive. A traditional ray tracing program processes one ray at a time. In such a serial approach, as much as ninety percent of the execution time is spent computing the intersection of a ray with the surface in the scene. With the CYBER 205, many rays can be intersected with all the bodies im the scene with a single series of vector operations. Vectorization of this intersection process results in large decreases in computation time. The CADLAB's interest in ray tracing stems from the need to produce realistic images of mechanical parts. A high quality image of a part during the design process can increase the productivity of the designer by helping him visualize the results of his work. To be useful in the design process, these images must be produced in a reasonable amount of time. This discussion will explain how the ray tracing process was vectorized and gives examples of the images obtained

The Making and Breaking of a Language: The French and Spanish Effect upon the Catalan Regional Language

Almost four hundred years ago, the French and Spanish governments divided the Catalan border regions located between their respective countries. The subsequent centuries have seen the expansion and development of the Catalan language in Spain and the demise of the Catalan language in France, where it has nearly deteriorated to disuse. Is this a reflection upon the French and Spanish culture or was it simply governmental policy? If so, what did the central governments of Madrid and Paris do in the centuries following the division that resulted in this contrasting development of Catalan? What effect did the usage of Catalan in governmental relations, schools, and quotidian life have on its discontinuance, its prospering? How does one measure the vitality of a regional language? This study, rooted in Grenoble and Whaley\u27s 1998 systemization of endangered language prospects, Toward a typology of language endangerment, will focus upon several categories such as governmental intervention, economic strength, religious involvement, but particularly the consequences that the unique French and Spanish cultures have had upon the regional language Catalan

Phonetic development in an agglutinating language

Child speech is highly variable. The speech apparatus—the vocal tract, tongue, teeth, and vocal folds—develop at different rates for different children, which helps explain some of the variability in children’s speech. For example, the ratio of the oral to pharyngeal cavities changes as children age, making it difficult to establish reliable articulatory routines (Smith and Goffman 1998; Vorperian et al. 2005). While anatomy does play this undeniable role in child speech development, this dissertation focuses instead on components in the child’s environment that may explain their speech patterns. To do so, the studies here report on speech development in bilingual children acquiring South Bolivian Quechua (henceforth “Quechua”) and Spanish in a mid-size town in Bolivia. Chapters 2 and 3 examine the environmental effect of Quechua’s linguistic structure on speech development while chapter 4 examines the role of quantity of language exposure.Chapter 2 examines how a phonological factor - vowel inventory—interacts with speech devel- opment. In Quechua, there are just three phonemic and two allophonic vowels. Chapter 2 asks if vowel inventory size mitigates acoustic variability in children aged four through ten. The study finds that children as young as four approximate adult-like acoustic targets, suggesting that child speech variability is contingent upon the language being learned. Still, children do not necessarily speak like adults. Using these vowel data, chapter 2 additionally finds that the children vary greatly in their ability to articulatorily compensate for their vocal tract morphologies, potentially explaining some of the large amounts of between-speaker variation that characterizes child speech.Chapter 3 examines how another aspect of Quechua’s linguistic structure - its highly agglutinat- ing morphology - may interact with speech development. In Quechua, speakers construct words by supplementing root morphemes with a series of grammatical suffixes. Chapter 3 asks if this word composition could interact with children’s coarticulatory patterns. Here coarticulation is quantified using two novel acoustic measures that are less susceptible to the challenges that the child vocal anatomy poses for traditional spectral analysis. In experiment 2 of chapter 3, these measures are validated on a large corpus of four-year-old children acquiring English.The central results of chapter 3 demonstrate that children and adults distinguish coarticulatorily between word environments: within morpheme (e.g. papa ‘potato’) and between morpheme (e.g. papa-pi ‘potato-loc). However, only children compensate for the morphologically complex words’ prosodic structure by shortening word duration. As a result, it remains unclear if the children’s spoken language patterns better reflect morphological or prosodic structure.Finally, chapter 4 asks how children’s language exposure and use—in Quechua or Spanish— predicts the speech production outcomes from chapters and 2 and 3. In this study, each child’s bilingual language use patterns are computed from daylong audio recordings of the children’s lan- guage environments. Employing random sampling to annotate the recordings, chapter 4 efficiently estimates the children’s bilingual language environments: the annotation method required an aver- age of just 90 minutes of language category annotation from each recording to effectively estimate each child’s dual language exposure.The chapter finds that children’s language exposure and use does indeed predict their speech patterns: children with monolingual Quechua mothers have tighter, less variable vowel categories than children with bilingual Quechua-Spanish or Quechua-dominant mothers. Additionally, children who use more Quechua throughout the day tend to distinguish more between the morphological environments tested in chapter 4. This last finding indicates that the more Quechua these children use, the better they are at analyzing and breaking down morphologically complex words.Overall, the results from this dissertation demonstrate how myriad factors relating to linguistic structure and quantity of language exposure predict child speech variation. In doing so, this work also demonstrates how understudied languages—and novel methodological techniques like child-friendly acoustic measures and daylong audio recordings—can reveal aspects of children’s psycholinguistic representations, addressing long-standing questions in the field. Thus, this dissertation concludes that children face anatomical obstacles, such as an unstable oral to pharyngeal cavity ratio, that explain some of their speech variability. However, these anatomical factors co-exist with numerous elements of the children’s everyday linguistic environments to predict speech development

The Contribution of Functional Load on Children's Vocalic Development

Children's phonology is replete with regular, predictable phenomena that nevertheless differ from adults. Discrepancies between adult and child speech cannot solely be attributed to environmental input, so immature motor development is often cited. Normally-developing children quickly acquire the motor skills and segment planning necessary to avoid these "errors." But phonological development continues well into late-childhood. For example, age and segment duration/variability are negatively correlated in English and French. Here we present contradictory data from Chuquisaca Quechua that show children producing shorter vowel durations than adults and attribute this to the role of functional load (FL). Interest in FL as an explanatory device for phoneme merger and segment inventories has recently resurfaced, but extension of the metric to phonological acquisition has been limited. FL is an important concept to apply to children's speech development because children's relatively smaller lexicons may lead them to make different generalizations regarding the relative importance of certain phonological contrasts. We test this hypothesis in Chuquisaca Quechua, a language where we predict maximal distinctiveness between adult and child lexica due to the language's morphological structure. We find that FL addresses this developmental pattern in the children's vowels

Vocal development in a large‐scale crosslinguistic corpus

This study evaluates whether early vocalizations develop in similar ways in children across diverse cultural contexts. We analyze data from daylong audio recordings of 49 children (1–36 months) from five different language/cultural backgrounds. Citizen scientists annotated these recordings to determine if child vocalizations contained canonical transitions or not (e.g., “ba” vs. “ee”). Results revealed that the proportion of clips reported to contain canonical transitions increased with age. Furthermore, this proportion exceeded 0.15 by around 7 months, replicating and extending previous findings on canonical vocalization development but using data from the natural environments of a culturally and linguistically diverse sample. This work explores how crowdsourcing can be used to annotate corpora, helping establish developmental milestones relevant to multiple languages and cultures. Lower inter‐annotator reliability on the crowdsourcing platform, relative to more traditional in‐lab expert annotators, means that a larger number of unique annotators and/or annotations are required, and that crowdsourcing may not be a suitable method for more fine‐grained annotation decisions. Audio clips used for this project are compiled into a large‐scale infant vocalization corpus that is available for other researchers to use in future work