Over the past several decades, American families have adopted thousands of children from outside of the United States. A large percentage of international adoptions come from South Korea (Selman, 2012). Transracial Korean-American adoptees must navigate circumstances unique to their situations as individuals with a birth culture and an adoptive culture...
Uploading everyday information about food intake, sleep, number of steps and then generating consolidated peer visual reports for participants in large-scale health studies, often divided into multiple treatment groups, can be challenging.
This challenge is even bigger if subjects are young teenagers between the age of 14-19 active in sports,...
Operating speed is one of the best performance measures that can tell transportation agencies how well or how poorly the transportation system is functioning. Fluctuating operating speeds often mean there is a design flaw or something about the physical road design that violates drivers' expectations. A primary example of this...
This thesis analyzes two Victorian fairy tales that feature queer endings, or endings that offer alternatives to the heteronormative fairy-tale tradition that idealizes heterosexual marriage and the biological family. In both George MacDonald’s The Wise Woman (1875) and E. Nesbit’s “The Island of the Nine Whirlpools” (1901), I argue that...
This thesis offers a theory of queer materiality as a way of understanding the interconnectedness of freaks, ghosts, and madness in Victorian culture, and how these elements coalesce in Victorian literature to destabilize the knowable materiality of normative social structures and forms of embodiment, leading to the production of queer...
Prebiotics are a subset of dietary fiber that is growing in demand within the food industry. The health benefits of prebiotics have been well established, leading to the increase in its incorporation into various food products. Given the importance of prebiotics as functional ingredients, it is important to understand their...
During summer and fall 2007, I traveled across Europe and studied in Spain. My experiences abroad shaped my reading of certain literary texts as I gained insight into the cultures and settings in which they were produced. In my thesis, I recount some of these experiences and show how my...
Examining directional decisions has proven easier in experiments with fish than in humans. With virtual reality, it is now easier to investigate directional decision-making behavior in humans. This remote virtual study examined directional decisions in 109 participants after watching virtual pedestrians, walking at different speeds and entering at different times,...
In the United States, children from underserved racial/ethnic backgrounds encounter greater environmental risk both in terms of the physical environment (e.g., housing quality, access to resources like health services and jobs, and exposure to environmental toxins) and the social environment (e.g., social support, neighborhood crime, racism, and discrimination), due to...
With trust in the media reaching an all-time low among Americans, I wanted to explore what prompted this shift in attitude. This thesis analyzes how Americans’ perspectives on the credibility of modern-day media and the value they place on the freedom of the press are heavily influenced by their preferred...