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Texas ScholarWorks was established to provide open, online access to the products of the University's research and scholarship, to preserve these works for future generations, to promote new models of scholarly communication, and to help deepen community understanding of the value of higher education.
UT Tower and campus image credit: Earl McGehee, CC-BY, https://www.flickr.com/photos/ejmc/7452145850
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Awareness of Cognitive Bias is an Integral Part of Health Literacy
(2021-05-11) Katragadda, Anila; Ring, David
Awareness of the errors a healthy human mind makes (cognitive errors) due to the short-cuts it uses to make pressing decisions (cognitive bias) is an important aspect of health literacy. This awareness, combined with practiced use of debiasing strategies is an important aspect of health literacy as well, and a key aspect of good health. Cognitive errors that result from biases lead patients to make decisions that lead to worse health outcomes. There are many types of cognitive bias that affect patient decision making and patient health outcomes such as confirmation bias, relative risk bias, and projection bias. In addition, there are three types of health literacy critical to patient decision making: functional health literacy, communicative health literacy, and critical health literacy. Functional health literacy is the most basic type because it encompasses the ability to read, write, and understand basic information. Communicative health literacy involves processing information and adapting that information to various circumstances. Critical health literacy involves critical analysis of information and relating information to personal life experiences (Ishikawa et al., 2008). This thesis will consist of a systematic literature review that evaluates the current literature about cognitive bias and decision making as well as health literacy and decision making. In addition, this thesis will identify gaps in the current research as well as propose potential new research questions that will be helpful in order to create new debiasing strategies and solutions to improve health literacy.
Phonetic corpus studies of Enenlhet vowels : quality, duration, and phonation
(2024-05) Wheeler, Paige Erin ; Epps, Patience, 1973-; Myers, Scott P.; Rajka Smiljanic; John Elliott; Anthony C. Woodbury
This dissertation presents three phonetic studies of vowels in Enenlhet, the first of their kind for the language. These studies draw on the naturalistic monologues in the Enenlhet Documentation corpus. The studies aim to acoustically characterize features of Enenlhet’s cross-linguistically unusual vowel inventory, which contains only three phonemic vowel qualities /a, e, o/. These studies contribute to the description of Enenlhet and to the growing body of phonetic research on Enlhet-Enenlhet languages more generally, opening the door to phonetic comparison, perception studies, and historical study of the language family. Each of these studies focuses on a specific feature of the Enenlhet vowel inventory: vowel quality (Chapter 2), vowel duration (Chapter 3), and voice quality (Chapter 4). Chapter 2 finds greater spread in the F2 dimension compared to the F1 dimension. The F1 dimension in Enenlhet does not use formant values associated with phonemic high vowels in other languages. Chapter 3 finds small changes in duration associated with immediately pre-pausal syllables, following voiced consonants, and open syllables. It does not find evidence for fixed stress or phonemic vowel length. Chapter 4 finds that vowels with adjacent glottal stops have a lower HNR, intensity, and H1-H2 and higher F0 than vowels adjacent to other segments. This study also finds acoustic evidence of glottalization in word-initial, onsetless syllables and in immediately pre-pausal syllables. In addition to providing a detailed phonetic exploration of these features, these studies contribute to the field of phonetics and phonology more broadly. Together, they paint a picture of a phonology that does not prioritize distinctiveness or salience of vowels. Such a system is cross-linguistically atypical, raising questions for speech perception research. In addition to questions related to speech perception, these studies showcase a broad range of variability, highlighting the importance of corpus studies for phonetic research. I argue that both experimental studies and corpus work are critical for robust phonetic descriptions.
Creative work in precarity : how musicians communicate for creativity and control in a diverse technological environment
(2024-05) Jensen, Jared Thomas ; Barbour, Joshua B.; Ganesh, Shiv; Slotta, James; Ballard, Dawna I.; Scott, Craig R
Creativity is fundamental to human labor, but the mainstream implementation of AI technologies with the capacity to automate creativity highlights long-standing tensions in creative industries between workers’ rights and the precarity of their work. Understanding creative work is therefore crucial for addressing emerging anxieties about the future of work. The following study focuses on musicians and how they communicate to accomplish creativity and control in their organizing. Musicians are the original gig worker and provide a useful lens because they organize within a power-laden industry, and they use and integrate a wide array of musical technologies to innovate and develop creative products. Through an iterative analysis of interviews and observations of independent band members, this study identifies a variety of communication practices and material symbolic technology uses that are central to musicians’ work. Overall, the study finds that musicians rely on their creative visions not only to guide the music they create but also to establish systems of group control. These arrangements shape and are shaped by how they use music technologies in their creative work. Musicians use technologies not only for music making but also for collaborating with each other—for producing and cultivating creative visions. AI technologies allow them to spark, motivate, and support their creative ideas, and to also navigate (and, at times, avoid) the difficult yet important work of collaborating with others. This study makes contributions to theories of organizational creativity and control by demonstrating that creative visions do not only consist of creative intentions but also always include governing practices. The study also makes contributions to theories of communication and technology and occupational identity by elucidating the material symbolic ways in which musicians use an array of technologies to align with institutionalized occupational commitments.
Quantitative image analysis elucidates properties of complex biological systems
(2024-05) Niese, Brandon August ; Gordon, Vernita Diane; Florin, Ernst Ludwig; Contreras, Lydia; Alvarado, Jose
This study introduces innovative quantitative image analysis methods for studying complex biological systems. It explores three distinct systems: Pseudomonas aeruginosa biofilms in mouse wound models, the polyextremophile bacterium Deinococcus radiodurans, and the human skin microbiome. Regarding P. aeruginosa biofilms, the study investigates how varying levels of Extracellular Polysaccharide Substance (EPS) production impact the biofilm's spatial properties in mouse wound environments. Mutant P. aeruginosa strains lacking Pel and/or Psl exopolysaccharide production showed altered biofilm aggregate size and distribution in wound tissue, with reduced survival under antibiotic treatment, suggesting a potential role for Pel and Psl in bacterial persistence in vivo. In the case of D. radiodurans, the research examines changes in nucleoid shape in response to different radiation doses. A radiation phenotype is defined, and the study explores the effects of various protein knockouts and knockdowns on this phenotype. Results indicate that ionizing radiation (IR) induces cell redistributions across sub-populations, with some showing morphologies indicating increased nucleoid condensation and fewer cells involved in cell division. The role of nucleoid-associated proteins (NAPs) in nucleoid compaction regulation remains unclear. Imaging of genomic mutants lacking known and suspected NAPs suggests that certain nucleic acid binding proteins, not previously identified as NAPs, can alter nucleoid compaction even without stress, and IR exposure increases the occurrence of these changes. For the human skin microbiome, deep learning techniques are applied in image analysis workflows to predict taxonomic diversity and the most abundant bacteria class in a sample. The model demonstrates strong performance, achieving an MSE of 0.0321 +/- 0.0035 for predicting the Shannon Diversity index and an accuracy of 94.0% +/- 0.7% for predicting the top taxonomic class. These findings underscore the potential of deep learning in analyzing the human skin microbiome and suggest applicability to other bacterial microbiomes. Overall, this research showcases the effectiveness of quantitative image analysis in understanding key properties and dynamics of complex biological systems, offering insights that can guide further studies in microbiology and biomedicine.
Immigrant cinephilia : toward a canon of Asian American women's cinema
(2024-05) Ho, Xuan An ; Reeves, Roger; Gopalan, Lalitha; Schlund-Vials, Cathy; Bennett, Chad
This dissertation presents the first book-length study on Asian American women’s cinema. In the investigation of this cinema, I develop a theory of immigrant cinephilia, a form of spectatorship in which cinema mediates my understanding of the phenomenon of immigration and in which my immigrant positionality mediates my reading and perception of cinema. I pose several questions: How does the immigrant function as a topic in the diegesis of the film? What pattern of formal or aesthetic strategies can be detected in Asian American women’s cinema? And how does cinema—as a set of representational techniques and as an archive—participate in knowledge production concerning lives on the move? Registering the reality of the massive scale of global dislocation, immigrant film seems an appropriate field in which these questions might be posed. For the purposes of this study, I focus on three directors: Chloé Zhao, Rea Tajiri, and Trinh T. Minh-ha. Embedded in these selections is the notion of eclecticism, not only in that the filmic traditions traverse diverse genres—from the Western to the home video to the essay film—but also in that the auteurs all come from different traditions. My choices purposefully play with the ambiguity of the immigrant by focusing on one director who was born in the United States, Rea Tajiri; one whose nationality is questionable, Chloé Zhao; which leaves only one who is unambiguously an Asian American immigrant, Trinh T. Minh-ha. By doing so, I allude to the shakiness, or even precariousness, of both the terms “immigrant” and “Asian American”; at the same time, I hope to emphasize immigrant cinema based on its shared principles, the unfixed positionality of the filmmaker in relation to the state, and aesthetic strategies, rather than simply limiting immigrant cinema to works made by and for immigrants. Theoretically, Asian American women’s cinema as immigrant cinema derives its ultimate coherence from the strategies of representing movement that I trace.