SOIRE 2015

This study was designed to test the effectiveness of two teaching methods on production of Mandarin Tone 3 by English-speaking learners. The control group of students (n=12) received the traditional instruction in which the direction of Tone 3 was emphasized while the experimental group of students (n=12) received the innovative instruction in which the height of Tone 3 was emphasized. The performance of these two groups of participants on producing Tone 3 on learnt and new words in the tonal environments of monosyllabic words, disyllabic words and sentences were tested three times (one month learning, two months learning, and three month learning). The results show the advantages of employing tonal height focused teaching method to teach Tone 3. First, tonal height focused teaching method works better on training students to produce tones in connected tonal environments which skill is more important for L2 learners to acquire for making phrases and sentences. Second, tonal height focused teaching method not only facilitate L2 learners to produce Tone 3 in trained lexical context, but also in untrained lexical context. It helps L2 learners to develop a self-learning skill on pronouncing unfamiliar words.

Effect of Different Teaching Methods on Production of Mandarin Dipping Tone by English Speaking Learners

This poster details an ongoing and expanding undergraduate research collaboration between the fields of American literature and Geographic Information Sciences (GIS) to further refine and develop the field of literary cartography. Over the past few years, I have been collaborating with students and professors in IESA to elucidate the literary and pedagogical value of reading texts geographically. This research grows out of the recent spatial turn in the humanities, which draws on the ideas of theorists like Edward Soja to eschew historical understandings of the nation state in favor of more spatial conceptions of how culture and capital function across borders. To this effect, literary cartography and Geographic Information Systems (GIS) have become indispensible in problematizing the stubborn nationalism and historical ideologies that underpin dominant understandings of space. 
The poster first examines the outcomes of a specific undergraduate research project that applies GIS technology to read Karen Tei Yamashita’s polyvocal text Tropic of Orange. In this stage of the research, we incorporated digital humanities methodologies to cartographically interpret the narrative, referential, and historical geographies transgressed by each character in the novel as they move between the capital of Los Angeles and Mazatlan. Reading the novel through GIS evinces a spatial understanding of the cross migrations of bodies and capital into and out of Los Angeles. Such a reading additionally reveals the inherent diversity of Yamashita’s real-imagined Los Angeles even as it discloses the shifting, transnational spaces within our post-modern capitals and the ways they might be re-imagined.
The poster also describes a fall 2015 “virtual learning community” where two separate classes – one of English majors and one of GIS majors – engage in a hands-on collaborative literary cartography project. The project asks GIS majors to independently create maps of specific interest areas within a novel for English majors, who then in turn use that data in their own research essays. The resulting student projects will extend the field of literary analysis to focus on geography, borders, and spatial construction.

Literary Cartography, Pedagogy, and Karen Yamashita's Tropic of Orange

Conceiving the Gothic: Embryology, Obstetrics, and the Gothic Novel, 1764-1820 is the first book-length study to argue that the Gothic novel in Britain emerged, at least in part, from a distinct embryological point of view and that the Gothic’s flourishing into the early nineteenth century can be explained as a response to significant changes in the reproductive landscape, including a new conception of fetal formation and development and the professionalization of the male obstetrician. Conceiving the Gothic argues that the Gothic novel can be defined as “epigenetic” literature in its focus on internal, organic, and democratic forms of biological and aesthetic origination; this epigenetic point of view emerges with increasing complexity in both the form and content of the novel over the course of its roughly 30 years of popularity in Britain. Blending literary analysis and the history of medicine to demonstrate that the reproductive body is not only a key signifier, but also a material reality upon which medical authority and the Gothic were built, this book offers fresh perspectives on works such as Ann Radcliffe’s The Italian (1797), Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), and Charles Robert Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer (1820). This study also includes a chapter that traces the real-life stories of famous obstetricians William Smellie and John Hunter, arguing that their reputations and their work have important parallels with the trope of the Gothic villain, signifying the intellectual traffic between science and art. The poster will provide a visual representation of the parallel trajectories of the Gothic novel, the rise of the obstetrician, and the acceptance of epigenesis among embryologists. The poster will show that as Radcliffe’s, Shelley’s, and Maturin’s novels become increasingly engaged with reproductive controversies, their form becomes increasingly epigenetic and Gothic. Providing analyses of both literary and medical texts, this study offers a new perspective on the origins of the Gothic and an example of the fruitful nature of interdisciplinary research.

Conceiving the Gothic: Embryology and Obstetrics in the Gothic Novel, 1764-1820

Transitioning fluently between watching a movement happen and understanding how a graph of that motion can be created is an early boundary concept in physics.
This project is an exploration of best practices in introducing motion graphing, goals mastered, and the common misconceptions that are encountered in non-science majors. Two classes were trained in how to use Tracker video analysis and modeling software and subsequently shown five graphs depicting position and time. The students were tasked with video recording a team member moving in order to creating a graph of that motion. Assessment involved a written description of motion and a graph being drawn to represent that motion. Analysis of open-ended concept-based questions was used to support development of best practices for the introduction of graphing motion.

Graphing Motion as a Concept Boundary in Pre-service Educators

This poster reflects the research conducted and expresses the conclusions drawn from my 2013 Presidential Summer Scholar Grant. With that grant, I conducted research on piracy in the Persian/Arabian Gulf in the early 19th century. This poster will suggest that the conclusion of piracy is both an apt and unfair designation for the actions undertaken. Showcasing two instances of so-called piracy from Sharjah in 1828 and Abu Dhabi in 1835 this poster will indicate the growth of the British East India Company's designation of piracy and the different ways piracy was instrumentalized by indigenous, autonomous rulers to greater or lesser success.

Maritime Violence or A Contest of Wills?: Abu Dhabi, Sharjah, and the British East India Company 1790-1830

During adolescence, the dopaminergic areas of the brain undergo continued development. These areas are often considered to be responsible for incentive-motivated and risk-taking behaviors [1]. Amphetamine (AMPH) increases dopamine (DA) in the synapse both by blocking the monoamine transporters and by releasing DA from synaptic stores and the nerve terminal [2]. Prescription AMPH, such as Adderall®, is one of the most common prescription drugs abused by students and it is possible that adolescent abuse of AMPH could lead to increased substance abuse in adulthood [3]. Because of the similarities between AMPH and Methamphetamine (METH), early AMPH abuse could create neurological changes during adolescent development that prime for METH abuse in adulthood [4]. Expanding on the findings of previous studies in this lab, the current study hypothesized that mice exposed to small, clinically relevant doses of AMPH during adolescence will show behavioral cross- sensitization to a sub-acute dose of METH during adulthood, and that males will demonstrate a higher response when compared to females. Such a response would indicate that AMPH abuse during this adolescent developmental window resulted in long lasting, sexually dimorphic neurological change.

The effects of adolescent ADHD medication on adult addiction susceptibility

Purpose: This poster display presents some of the archival material uncovered over the course of two research trips to specific places that Matthew Arnold, Victorian poet & essayist, visited on his first North American lecture tour. The display highlights some formerly undocumented locations at which Arnold lectured and archival photographs of some of the spaces that no longer exist. Not only will a visitor be able to see these images, but also will be able to engage with the emerging interactive map which is this project’s ultimate goal. These research trips have been made possible by two Shott Scholar Summer Awards.
History: This interactive, digital humanities project visually renders Arnold’s first lecture tour through North America from 1889-1884. Using the collected Letters of Matthew Arnold, several biographies, and an early dissertation, a fairly accurate but incomplete list of all Arnold’s lecture stops was created. The dates of each lecture and the title of the lecture (or other works) that Arnold read were added. Finally, GIS student Woody dePew created a static map. Through additional research, more accurate locations and dates were found, and I began inputting the locations into GoogleMaps. Viewers can now zoom in to street-level views of each location by visiting the interactive map. Over time, an interactive narrative has emerged and several heretofore unknown sites have been uncovered.
Status: A map visitor can click on each location (represented by a virtual pin on the map if a public venue, and a star if a college/university venue) and a window will pop up giving the viewer the lecture venue, the date(s) on which Arnold lectured, the lecture (or other work) title, and a brief narrative of the circumstances surrounding the visit (often gleaned from contemporary local newspapers). The visitor may then scroll through images of the location – past and current – as well as view images of any archival material that could be found.
Future: The project continues to grow and is currently linked to several major Victorian studies websites. Over the coming years, I hope to continue visiting these locations, photographing them as they currently appear and finding any archival materials that may be uncovered. There are still some unknown sites, and further research may make these locations more concrete.

Research, Render, & Recover: Mapping Matthew Arnold's First N. American Lecture Tour

Paraspinal muscles support spine and are the source of movement force. The cross section area (CSA) size, shape, density and volume are affected by many factors, such as surgery, age, health condition, exercise, and low back pain. Manual measurements of paraspinal muscle CSA and volume in CT images is inaccurate and time consuming.

Minimally invasive spine surgery (MISS) was introduced to provide less muscle tissue injury, less postoperative pain and earlier mobilization than traditional open back surgery. Physicians can use the computed tomography (CT) images to estimate volume of muscles surrounding the spine before and after the MISS operation. The thickness of reconstruction of CT slices is determined during scanning. If the size of muscle region in CT images can be measured, the volumetric estimation of muscle tissues surrounding the spine can be obtained by calculating the sum of the products of the slice thickness and the muscle region size of each CT slice. Hence, segmenting the muscle region in CT images becomes the key step in the procedure of estimating paraspinal muscle volume. The results can be used to evaluate tissue injury and postoperative back muscle atrophy of MISS patients. The results can also help to optimize patient rehabilitation management and monitor its effectiveness.

Automatic paraspinal muscle segmentation in CT images is challenging because the variability of anatomical muscle shape is large among images, and the range of Hounsfield units of muscle overlaps with that of other nearby soft tissues. There is no clearly defined relationship between interested muscle regions and voxel intensities. To make the task even more difficult, parts of the boundaries of the interested muscle groups are very close to those of the spine and other organs, making region growing-based algorithms ineffective.

This work proposes an atlas-based algorithm to segment paraspinal muscle regions in CT images. It consists of three main steps: (1) global image alignment; (2) local contour optimization; and (3) local deformation. In step 1, the affine transformation from spine contours in atlas and target is estimated after points in the two contours are registered. During step 2, to overcome anatomical region shape and size variations, especially the changes of relative spatial relation of spine and paraspinal muscles among the reference atlas and target images, intensity difference list (IDI) along the normal line of a contour point p is used to optimize the contour of region of interest in the target images. In step 3, a GVF snake deformation algorithm refines the boundary contour of paraspinal muscles. Intensity Space Map (ISM) is used in this step to generate a muscle shape prior.

Experimental results show that the atlas-based algorithm combined with local optimization and intensity space map effectively segment paraspinal muscle regions. A single atlas is needed to processing a sequence images, making it efficient to process a sequence of CT images. It provides a solid foundation for muscle volume estimation for physicians to evaluate muscle damage due to spine surgery and monitor the progress of patient recovery.

Paraspinal Muscle Segmentation in CT Images using a Single Atlas

Brain MR image segmentation is one of the most important applications of image segmentation technique in medicine, and is an important part of clinical diagnostic tools. Segmented image can help physicians to identify tumor tissues in brain, estimate tumor size, and monitor effectiveness of chemotherapy treatments. Manual segmentation of tumor regions in MR images is not only inaccurate, but also time consuming.

In a ColorMRITM fusion image of axial brain shown in Figure 1, the active tumor is pink exhibiting some heterogeneity and the adjacent white matter is edematous (pale green). Segmentation using pixel color intensities directly will group together specific areas of gadolinium uptake in the tumor as well as some non-specific uptake in the posterior orbital fat together (Figure 2). Obviously, using Figure 2 can not measure tumor region area correctly.
Fuzzy c-means (FCM) is a clustering method that allows a data point to belong to more than one cluster. Each point has a degree of belonging to a cluster. However, FCM along can not correctly segment tumor tissues in brain MR images. Intensity Space Map (ISM) is a region growing segmentation algorithm for medical images. The assumption for ISM is that pixels inside the region of interest not only have similar color intensities but also connect to other pixels inside the anatomical region. For color MR images, there are multiple intensity channels, i.e. red, green and blue channels respectively. Hence, an Intensity Space Map (ISM) is proposed for each color channel in a color image.

The ISM algorithm starts with a pre-selected seed point inside the region of interest. Initial values of all pixels in the ISM image are set to zero. During each iteration, the ISM values of pixels of each intensity channel which satisfy both of the following conditions are incremented by 1: Condition 1: pixel intensity difference from the seed point is within a threshold T; Condition 2: the pixel belongs to a structure which overlaps the seed point.


In this work, we use the intensity space map (ISM) and fuzzy c-means algorithms to perform brain tumor segmentation in images extracted from longitudinal relaxation time T1 and transverse relaxation time T2 MR images. ISM utilizes both pixel color intensity and image topological information. It is a promising candidate as a predicate used for segmentation. Experimental results show that fuzzy c-means segmentation applied on ISM can effectively segment brain tumor regions in MR images. It provides a solid foundation for tumor volume estimation for physicians to evaluate progress of the cancer and effectiveness of chemotherapy treatments.

A Novel Segmentation Approach for Brain Tumor in MRI

The goal of classic influence maximization in Online Social Networks (OSNs) is to maximize the spread of influence with a fix budget constraint, e.g. the size of seed nodes is pre-determined. However, most existing works on influence maximization overlooked the information timeliness. That is, these works assume the influence will not decay with time and the influence could be accepted immediately, which are not practical. Secondly, even the influence could be passed to a special node in time, whether the influence could be delivered (influence take effect) or not is still an unknown question. Furthermore, if let the number of users who are influenced as the depth of influence and the area covered by influenced users as the breadth, most of research results are only focus on the influence depth instead of the influence breadth. Timeliness, acceptance ratio and breadth are three important factors neglected but strong affect the real result of influence maximization. In order to fill the gap, a novel algorithm that incorporates time delay for timeliness, opportunistic selection for acceptance ratio and broad diffusion for influence breadth has been investigated in this paper. In our model, the breadth of influence is measured by the number of communities, and the tradeoff between depth and breadth of influence could be balanced by a parameter φ. Empirical studies on different large real-world social networks show that our model demonstrates that high depth influence does not necessarily imply broad information diffusion. Our model, together with its solutions, not only provides better practicality but also gives a regulatory mechanism for influence maximization as well as outperforms most of the existing classical algorithms.