A Mind for Language: How Language Shapes Our Reality

To write of language is an unusual activity, for it is to describe something by, through, and with itself. This thesis not only defends the view advanced by Sapir and Whorf of linguistic relativism, but extends their thesis with an application of Heidegger, and conflates the terms of language and self. Ultimately, I believe this endeavor is one which is not successful, but which also yields significant implications for further thought on the philosophical relevance of linguistic relativism. Section two presents some initial thoughts on language and self; the third section describes the terms of language, whereas the fourth one describes those of the self. A fifth section then deals with the general interactions and observations of the interrelatedness between these terms, with a conclusion which highlights the main insights of the inquiry. (A brief appendix with some remarks on poetry follows this thesis.

Internal and External Factors Associated with Illicit Prescription Drug Use in College Students

With data suggesting emerging adulthood is a time of increased risk for illicit prescription drug use, it is essential that factors contributing to this be understood to guide prevention efforts. Internal factors (stress, GPA, gender) and external factors (type of institution, living situation) were assessed in tandem with perceptions of harm and illicit prescription drug use. In accordance with nationwide research (SAMSHA, 2006), 14% of our sample of Oregon college students reported illicitly using prescription drugs. While rates of use did not vary by gender, females held higher perceptions of harm. Perceived harm was high for our sample and inversely correlated with use. Those living on campus reported higher perceptions of harm and less use than those living off campus. Those attending private academic institutions reported higher perceptions of harm and less use than those attending public institutions. Previous studies suggest a heightened sense of community within schools, comparatively present within private institutions, can reduce drug use (Battistich, & Hom, 1997). Stress was positively correlated with use and GPA was negatively correlated with use. While numerous studies have examined various correlates of prescription drug use, few have sampled beyond a single institution, most within public universities. Thus, the inclusion of private institutions offers unique and a more holistic insight. As drug use continues to increase in college populations even with prevention programs in place, it is imperative to translate these findings into prevention targeting both genders, at times of stress, particularly those living off campus, at public universities, with lower GPAs

Hierarchical Sound Event Classification

Task 5 of the Detection and Classification of Acoustic Scenes and Events (DCASE) 2019 challenge is "urban sound tagging''. Given a set of known sound categories and sub-categories, the goal is to build a multi-label audio classification model to predict whether each sound category is present or absent in an audio recording. We developed a model composed of a preprocessing layer that converts audio to a log-mel spectrogram, a VGG-inspired Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) that generates an embedding for the spectrogram, a pre-trained VGGish network that generates a separate audio embedding, and finally a series of fully-connected layers that converts these two embeddings (concatenated) into a multi-label classification. This model directly outputs both “fine” and “coarse” labels; it treats the task as a 37-way multi-label classification problem. One version of this network did better at the coarse labels (CNN+VGGish1); another did better with fine labels on Micro AUPRC (CNN+VGGish2). A separate family of CNN models was also trained to take into account the hierarchical nature of the labels (Hierarchical1, Hierarchical2, and Hierarchical3). The hierarchical models perform better on Micro AUPRC with fine-level classification.24825

Multicultural Competence in Counseling Students: Addressing Social Class in Multicultural Counseling Courses

There are consistent findings of clinician bias toward clients of differing social classes, and little research about faculty efforts to address bias within educational programs. Informed by a literature review, quantitative methodology and descriptive exploratory design were used to examine counselor educators’ instructional strategies for teaching multicultural counseling. Additionally, perceptions of faculty effectiveness and comfort level with social class issues were explored

Transport and Use of a Centaur Second Stage in Space

As nations continue to explore space, the desire to reduce costs will continue to grow. As a method of cost reduction, transporting and/or use of launch system components as integral components of missions may become more commonplace in the future. There have been numerous scenarios written for using launch vehicle components (primarily space shuttle used external tanks) as part of flight missions or future habitats. Future studies for possible uses of launch vehicle upper stages might include asteroid diverter using gravity orbital perturbation, orbiting station component, raw material at an outpost, and kinetic impactor. The LCROSS (Lunar CRater Observation and Sensing Satellite) mission was conceived as a low-cost means of determining whether water exists at the polar regions of the moon. Manifested as a secondary payload with the LRO (Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter) spacecraft aboard an Atlas V launch vehicle, LCROSS guided its spent Centaur Earth Departure Upper Stage (EDUS) into the lunar crater Cabeu's, as a kinetic impactor. This paper describes some of the challenges that the LCROSS project encountered in planning, designing, launching with and carrying the Centaur upper stage to the moon

Flight Operations for the LCROSS Lunar Impactor Mission

The LCROSS (Lunar CRater Observation and Sensing Satellite) mission was conceived as a low-cost means of determining the nature of hydrogen concentrated at the polar regions of the moon. Co-manifested for launch with LRO (Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter), LCROSS guided its spent Centaur upper stage into the Cabeus crater as a kinetic impactor, and observed the impact flash and resulting debris plume for signs of water and other compounds from a Shepherding Spacecraft. Led by NASA Ames Research Center, LCROSS flight operations spanned 112 days, from June 18 through October 9, 2009. This paper summarizes the experiences from the LCROSS flight, highlights the challenges faced during the mission, and examines the reasons for its ultimate success