Documentation of cultural landscape alteration at the Heritage Mounds site, Georgia

This project used geoarchaeological techniques to examine how humans impacted the landscape at the middle Mississippian archaeological site Heritage Mounds (9DU2), in Dougherty County, Georgia, specifically looking at a borrow pit and a plaza. The site was the civic and ceremonial capital of the Capachequi territory, occupied at two separate times between AD 1250 – 1700. At the site soil samples were collected from two excavation units and two wetland cores. The units were for analysis of the plaza, and the cores were for analysis of the Mound A borrow pit. The samples were used for particle size and chemical analysis, and were examined for anomalies. These anomalies in the data allowed me to identify the process of earth-moving for the plaza creation, as well as documenting the incidental effects of their farming and earth-moving in the borrow pit

Synthesis of 2,4-Disubstituted Pyrimidine Derivatives as Potential 5-HT7 Receptor Antagonist.

The synthesis of a series of 2-chloropyrimidine derivatives is described. The synthesis began with a nucleophilic addition of lithiated heterocyclic molecules to the 4 position of 2-chloropyrimidine to give dihydropyrimidine intermediates. The intermediates were oxidized to the pyrimidine ring using the DDQ method. This was followed by an addition-elimination reaction of an amine to the 2-chloropyrimidine derivative. The structure and properties of the final compounds were analyzed by melting point, combustion analysis, and 13C-NMR and 1H-NMR spectroscopy. Biological activities in vitro of the synthesized compounds as antagonists of the 5-HT2a and 5-HT7 receptors were determined by an independent laboratory

Perceptions of Seventh- and Eighth-Grade Girls toward Coeducational Physical Education Classes in Five Middle Schools in East Tennessee.

The purpose of this study was to examine the participation, perceptions, and preferences of seventh- and eighth-grade girls in coeducational and gender-separated physical education classes in five schools in East Tennessee. The participants in this study were seventh- and eighth-grade girls attending public schools in two East Tennessee counties. Participants completed a questionnaire pertaining to their physical education classes. Although 465 students were invited to participate in this study, only 241 students returned the permission form. This resulted in a 50% response rate. The findings were descriptive in nature, although basic analyses were calculated to identify any relationships among the different variables. The literature review examined adolescents\u27 activity patterns, adolescents\u27 self-esteem, gender equity issues, coeducational physical education versus same-gender physical education, and physical educators and their roles. The study revealed that most seventh- and eighth-grade girls dressed out for physical education and participated in coeducational physical education classes. A majority of the seventh- and eighth-grade girls preferred having a female physical education teacher. Seventh- and eighth-grade girls\u27 participation rates did not decrease in a coeducational class setting. There was not a significant relationship between the gender of the physical education teacher and seventh- and eighth-grade girls\u27 participation in physical education activities. Seventh- and eighth-grade girls agreed their physical education teachers were fun, fair, and easy to talk to. Seventh- and eighth-grade girls also agreed that their physical education teachers explained things well and motivated them to do their best. Having boys in physical education classes was not a major factor for girls in dressing out for physical education classes or in their participation rates

Investigating an Acoustic Measure of Perceived Isochrony in Conversation: Preliminary Notes on the Role of Rhythm in Turn Transitions

In a preliminary investigation of isochrony, the rhythmic integration of talk, we evaluated rhythmic phenomena previously theorized to coordinate turn-transitions for correlates in the acoustic signal. Rhythmic sequencing is one of many elaborate contextualization cues regarded as facilitating a successful turn-transition. Previous studies of rhythm in conversation have attended only to its perceptual and interactional facets. In addressing this gap, our study finds quantitative justification for such claims of rhythmic turn-taking. We selected for acoustic analysis the twelve non-task-based, dyadic conversations of the Santa Barbara Corpus of Spoken American English (SBCSAE). Following Marcus’s (1981) assertion that the onset of the vowel is the closest acoustically-measurable location to the perceptual center of the syllable where the rhythmic downbeat occurs, duration was measured between vowel onsets to create prosodic syllables. Not all prosodic syllables can contain a rhythmic beat, and those that can are characterized as “prominent” in nature (Couper-Kuhlen 1993). Out of 42,807 prosodic syllables measured, our methods yielded 15,972 prominent prosodic syllables. The units of duration between prominent syllables, hereafter intervals, were judged to form an isochronous sequence when the durations between at least three consecutive intervals varied by less than the conservative measure of the perceptual threshold for tolerance of isochrony, up to a 30% variance (Couper-Kuhlen 1993). This measure revealed 564 rhythmic sequences across the twelve SBCSAE conversations, which ranged in duration between one and ten seconds and consisted of up to eleven intervals. Of these, 208 or 37% appeared within turn-transitions, and results from our preliminary analysis indicated that rhythmic sequencing was significantly more likely to appear within a turn-transition than outside of one. Our analysis shows that isochrony is not simply perceptual in nature, but that it has a quantifiable correlate in the acoustic signal. Our findings of significant isochrony in the turn-transitions of the SBCSAE, a corpus often used in discourse analysis, confirms what many interactional sociolinguists have long argued: that rhythmic cues aid the coordination of talk between speakers in turn-transitions. We can confirm that these rhythmic cues are a component of turn-transitions not only perceptually, but acoustically as well

Gut Feelings: Race and the Embodied Self: An Interview with Shannon Sullivan

Shannon Sullivan is Chair of Philosophy and Professor of Philosophy and Health Psychology at UNC Charlotte. She specializes in feminist philosophy, critical philosophy of race, American philosophy (especially pragmatism), . and continental philosophy. She is the author of four books, most recently, Good White People: The Problem with Middle-Class White Anti-Racism (2014) and The Physiology of Sexist and Racist Oppression (2015). She also is co-editor of four books, including Race and Epistemologies of Ignorance (2007) and Feminist Interpretations of William James (2015)

Predicting Prostate Cancer Aggressiveness through a Nanoparticle Test

Prostate cancer (PCa) is the most common malignancy and the second leading cause of cancer death in American men. Due to the lack of accurate tests to distinguish aggressive cancer from indolent tumor, prostate cancer is often over-treated. Post-surgery pathology analysis revealed that 30% of tumors removed by radical prostatectomy are deemed clinically insignificant and would not have required such invasive treatment.^1^ Over-diagnosis and treatment of low-risk prostate cancer has serious and long-lasting side effect: as high as 70% of the patients who receive radical prostatectomy treatment will suffer a loss of sexual potency that cannot be remedied by drugs such as sildenafil citrate.^2^ We herein report a simple nanoparticle-serum protein adsorption test that not only can distinguish prostate cancer from normal and benign conditions, but also is capable of predicting the aggressiveness of prostate cancer quantitatively. This new test could potentially deliver the long-expected and very much needed solution for better individualization of prostate cancer treatment

Programas de estudios en el extranjero: maximizar las aptitudes interculturales

With increasing globalization, study abroad programs are becoming more common and popular in the United States. Unfortunately, many of the programs are not being used to their full potential to help students gain intercultural skills. This paper will present academic research on the definition and key characteristics of diverse cultural skills, methods for measuring those skills, and how study abroad programs can maximize students\u27 learning potential. Throughout this paper, I also reflect on my own experiences of study abroad in Medellin, Colombia, and Oviedo, Spain, and draw conclusions about my own travels and discoveries about cultural identity. Learning to be culturally competent is a vital skill in this increasingly interconnected world, and I hope this essay can shed some light on the subject

Humanoid Walking Robot

Our project is focused on research and development of the application of Hydro Muscles to biologically inspired humanoid robots. Our team designed, researched, and developed a bio-inspired, bipedal walking robot to simulate the human gait cycle. The walking motion is actuated by Hydro Muscles, which are soft artificial muscles that are driven pneumatically or hydraulically to contract and expand longitudinally. These artificial muscles were were modeled to match mass scaled actuation of human muscles on a lower limb skeletal model to create a biologically authentic gait. Further extensions of this project would explore this robots potential for clinical, prosthetic, military defense, and other applications

The Auditory Comprehension of Unaccusative Verbs in Aphasia

Some persons with aphasia, particularly those diagnosed with a Broca’s aphasia, exhibit a delayed time course of lexical activation in canonically ordered S-V-O sentences (Ferrill et al., 2012) and delayed re-activation of displaced arguments in sentences that contain syntactic dependencies (Love et al., 2008). These patterns support the Delayed Lexical Activation (DLA) hypothesis: Lexical activation is delayed relative to the normal case, and thus lexical activation and syntactic operations are de-synchronized; that is, lexical access is too slow for normally fast-acting syntactic operations. This delay in lexical access leads to what appear to be syntactic comprehension deficits in aphasia. In the current study we further examined lexical activation during sentence comprehension in persons with aphasia by using unaccusative verbs. Unaccusative verbs are a type of intransitive verb with a single argument that is base generated in object position and displaced to the surface subject position, leaving behind a copy or trace (‘gap’) of the movement (see, for example, Burzio, 1986), as in: 1. The girl vanished Thus there is a syntactic dependency between the two positions. When encountering sentences that contain syntactic dependencies (e.g., object relatives, Wh-questions) neurologically unimpaired individuals immediately reactivate the displaced argument at the gap (Shapiro et al., 1999; Love et al., 2008). In contrast to this immediate reactivation, prior findings indicate that neurologically unimpaired individuals do not reactivate the displaced argument in similar sentences with unaccusative verbs until 750ms downstream from the gap (Friedmann et al., 2008). This built-in delay observed with unaccusative verbs in neurologically healthy participants provides a unique opportunity to further examine lexical delays in individuals with Broca’s aphasia. Importantly, individuals with Broca’s aphasia may have unaccusative verb deficits. Previous research has found that persons with aphasia have difficulty producing unaccusative verbs. Offline truth-value judgment tasks with intransitive sentences containing unaccusative verbs do not reveal comprehension deficits (Lee & Thompson, 2004). However, in a sentence-picture matching task, McAllister et al. (2009) found lower accuracy for intransitive sentences that contained unaccusative verbs than transitive sentences. We entertain the following hypothesis: The delayed lexical access routines better synchronize with the delay of reactivating the argument of unaccusatives, suggesting that individuals with Broca’s aphasia should evince a pattern like that of unimpaired individuals. Alternatively, participants with Broca’s aphasia might show activation even further downstream from the gap, given that in other sentence constructions containing syntactic dependencies they exhibit a delayed pattern of reactivation compared to neurologically unimpaired individuals