Atmospheric fine particulate matter (PM2.5) has been linked to the death of 7 million people per year around the planet. The organic portion of PM2.5 is responsible for increases in oxidative stress, inflammation, mutation and carcinogenesis. Anthropogenic activity releases more organic material into the atmosphere, and has increased the amount...
Software (OSS) communities and that women disproportionately experience such barriers. However, this research has focused mainly on social/cultural factors, ignoring the environment itself — the tools and infrastructure. To shed some light onto how tools and infrastructure might somehow factor into OSS barriers to entry, we conducted a field study...
End-user programming has become widespread. The increasing size of this population and the prevalence of barriers that they face has sparked the development of approaches that promote end-user programing by helping them overcome barriers and teaching them programming. Despite the fact that these approaches have done well in achieving those...
In previous work, the Idea Garden was created to help those relatively new to programming overcome their barriers in CoScripter. The goal of this thesis was to generalize the Idea Garden's success to other users and environments. We present a set of principles on how to help EUPs like this...
Most software systems today do not support cognitive diversity. Further, because of differences in problem-solving styles that cluster by gender, software that poorly supports cognitive diversity can also embed gender biases. To help software professionals fix gender bias “bugs” related to people’s problem-solving styles for information processing and learning of...
Background: Although some previous research has found ways to find inclusivity bugs (biases in software that introduce inequities among cognitively diverse individuals), little attention has been paid to how to go about fixing such bugs. We hypothesized that Information Architecture (IA)--the way information is organized, structured and labeled--may provide the...
The inverse electron demand Diels Alder reaction between tetrazines and strained alkenes is an exceptionally useful tool in functionalizing to biomolecules since it is orthogonal to the chemistry of most living systems and have exceptionally high rate constants. In particular reactions between strained trans-cyclooctenes (sTCO) and tetrazines can achieve second...
Previous work introduced the GenderMag method, a software inspection method used to help software creators identify features within their software that are not gender-inclusive. Inclusiveness of software (gender or otherwise) matters because supporting diversity matters—it is well-known that the more diverse a group of problem-solvers, the higher the quality of...
Ocean acidification (OA) is altering the chemistry of the world’s oceans at rates unparalleled in the past roughly 1 million years. Understanding the impacts of this rapid change in baseline carbonate chemistry on marine organisms needs a precise, mechanistic understanding of physiological responses to carbonate chemistry. Recent experimental work has...
How can software practitioners assess whether their software supports diverse users? Although there are empirical processes that can be used to find “inclusivity bugs” piecemeal, what is often needed is a systematic inspection method to assess software’s support for diverse populations. To help fill this gap, this thesis introduces InclusiveMag,...