While professionals in the Information Technology (IT) industry are able to read and understand new terms by associating them with previous knowledge and current context, professionals outside of the industry struggle with unfamiliar words and acronyms in dense technical documents. In these circumstances, many people turn to online resources such as Wikipedia to define or explain terms they don’t understand. Yet, switching attention between reading an article and searching for information using various resources can increase cognitive load, thereby increasing perceived stress level and potentially reducing the effectiveness of both tasks. To address this problem, we propose the D-Jargonizer: a web-based tool that assists non-technical professionals as they read complex technical documents by allowing users to select and define technical terms with minimal distraction. We hypothesize that this tool will reduce cognitive load, perceived stress and make it more enjoyable for professionals outside of the IT field to read and comprehend technical documents. First, using a diagramming application, we will create a static prototype that imitates the proposed functionality of the D-Jargonizer. Students at the University of Washington who are unfamiliar with technical documents will be recruited to test perceived stress and enjoyment while using the prototype, as well as provide feedback about the overall user experience. Based on our initial user testing, we will develop a Google Chrome extension that allows users to select a term on a web page, searches for the term in an ontology based on Wikipedia entries and displays the definition in a text box on the page itself. Our tool will be tested again to confirm our hypothesis and verify usability. While the D-Jargonizer currently focuses on helping people understand technical documents, the basic concept could be applicable to medical or legal documents in the future.

NSFW (“Not Safe For Work”) is an acronym used to indicate that a website, a picture, or a link contains inappropriate (usually pornographic) content. One could say that all of 4chan.org is NSFW. 4chan is an imageboard where communication takes place in the form of pictures and images posted by anonymous users and deleted minutes after they appear online. This anonymity and ephemerality of communication unleashes levels of racism, sexism, homophobia, and general malevolence unseen in Social Web communities like Facebook. However, 4chan operates with virtually no advertisement (or profit-motive) while Facebook is now a publicly traded corporation, with a mandate to generate revenue for its stockholders by monetizing its assets, which happen to be the words, pictures, jokes, and plans of its more than 1 billion users. Discourses surrounding the Social Web speak in terms of “openness,” “connectivity,” and “transparency,” promising a more civil online community. However, these trends make personal data and communication susceptible to appropriation by capital. How has 4chan remained a largely non-commodified space in the midst of the corporate colonization of the Social Web, and what do we make of its sociopathic ethos? I studied the community and signifying practices of 4chan's random board /b/, finding that although the fundamental anonymity and ephemerality of communication on the board free up participants to be racist, sexist, homophobic, and generally malevolent to degrees unseen in the Social web, these same conditions create a space for truly free speech (in both the monetary and behavioral sense), creating a novel mode of signification and a space for subversive political consciousness in the process.

Natural Language Processing is a subfield of Computer Science that inspects the intersection of computation and human language. Idiomatic language is in turn ubiquitous in human language—when someone is a “diamond in the rough”, they are not literally an uncut diamond, rather, they are a person whose goodness is hidden by their surface appearance. However, a “diamond in the rough” is a phrase that can literally mean an uncut diamond—this is to say, it has two different senses, one that is idiomatic and one that is literal. Given a dictionary entry, a human can easily distinguish between idiomatic and literal definitions, however, doing this in an automatic fashion is difficult because it requires asking whether the meaning represented in the definition corresponds with the literal meaning of the phrase. This research leverages Wiktionary, an extremely large, collaboratively authored dictionary, to perform idiom identification in a scalable manner through machine learning algorithms. To do this identification, we are developing two sets of features—traits that we describe a definition-phrase pair with—selectional preference features and graph-based features. Selectional preference features describe traits of language that are used in a way that violates its literal meaning while graph-based features describe where the entry occurs in relation to the other pages within Wiktionary (what links does this page contain?). We are using two kinds of machine learning algorithms for idiom identification—supervised methods and semi-supervised methods. Supervised methods allow us to verify the validity of the features that we develop, and semi-supervised methods allow us to use these features for knowledge discovery because they are ideal for discovering definitions that are not yet marked as idiomatic but that ought to be.

From a young age, every child in Singapore is taught that the surest way to succeed in life is to have academic success. Education is seen as a way to secure your bread and butter as it leads to a well-paying job, which then allows you to afford a comfortable lifestyle. Of course, few would argue against education being one of the most important things in a person’s development. But when the stakes for being the smartest in your class are so high, the education system inevitably becomes a rat race for the highest numbers and the best scores. There is an “overbearing focus on grades and paper qualifications are elevated to unholy heights and worshipped,” and this pressure gives birth to a generation of Singaporeans who are risk-averse, lack the motivation to think critically, and don’t have the drive to innovate. The Singaporean education system is touted as a meritocratic one that allows students the freedom to climb the social ladder provided that they are hardworking enough to achieve the grades to advance. A meritocratic system seems fair as grades and paper qualifications don’t lie, but this encourages a tunnel-vision approach to education, ignoring the many aspects of education which cannot be measured by numbers. Is meritocracy at fault, then, for creating a generation of humanistic robots? I will examine and critique the current educational system in place by highlighting its faults and advantages, as well as by drawing contrasts with the systems in other countries. I hope to propose a way to reform Singapore’s education system for the better, to one that is more holistic, aiming to produce a generation of creative and motivated thinkers, which will help Singapore progress even further into the 21st Century.

Like their Victorian forebears, Modernist authors have always placed keen emphasis on women’s hair, often presenting their luscious locks in vivid and scrupulous detail. Aldous Huxley's Crome Yellow (1920) uses hair as a tool of social commentary and trope of the fairytale epic to challenge and even reverse traditional Victorian gender roles and sexuality norms. The tension between the private and public self is also explored; what Modernist women could not say aloud, they expressed through the style, color and length of their hair. Crome Yellow constantly alludes to the hair of the female protagonists Jenny Mullion and Mary Bracegirdle, yet the intentions behind the loaded descriptions of their physical appearance are left up in the air. The characterization of an infamous Fallen Woman and modern flapper girl allows distinctions to be made between the Victorian and Modernist eras that determine the emergence of new gender ideals. This paper will use a close reading of Crome Yellow and Freudian theories on sexuality to explore the multifaceted significance of hair in the Victorian era so we may fully appreciate the past’s influence on modernist eras. A woman’s hair became a phallic image used to engender fear in men, which posits a move towards gender equality and the emergence of the suffragette. Hair was no longer just a physical attribute but a body politic that reflected changes taking place in modernist British society of the entre deux guerres period.

Many have demonstrated that Edmund Burke and other male writers contributed to, if not constructed, a gender binary in which males perpetually subdue and dominate the feminine. For instance, in A Vindication of the Rights of Men, Mary Wollstonecraft deconstructs passages from Edmund Burke's Reflections on the French Revolution, demonstrating that his ideal world is one in which sublime, masculine authority usurps the rights of women. For Wollstonecraft, Burke's efforts to counter revolutionary ideas are of no benefit to women. While these readings are certainly valid, some scholars have expressed the concern that in limiting our understanding of masculinity to its being a fixed institution determined to maintain power over women, we are grossly over-simplifying individual as well as collective masculine experience(s). Thus, I hope for this project to contribute to a more complex portrait of masculinity particularly in the late 18th century. Limiting my discussion to Burke's Reflections and Thomas Paine's Common Sense, I argue that however much these two literary works convey opposing ideologies, elements of their rhetorical strategy reveals that both writers understood that the success of their arguments largely depended on how effectively they controlled the semantic value of manliness. In order to provoke revolution, Paine seeks to assure his readers that engaging in revolution is an indisputable reflection of manhood. But unlike Paine, Burke wrote in order to prevent revolution. In the Reflections, Burke argues that the failure to sustain the pre-established order would result in the failure to retain masculinity. Ultimately, that Paine and Burke fought to control the meaning of manhood suggests masculinity was a loosely defined social institution--one consisting of males who lived in perpetual fear of losing, or failing to perform their masculinity; who were ever in need of affirmation that they were, indeed, men.

Matthew G. Lewis' Gothic novel The Monk (1796) has often been read as a representation of England's disapprobative response to the violence and chaos of the French Revolution.  The novel's subtle treatment of paranoia, which was a common theme during the Reign of Terror, and clear defilement of the virtuous feminine icon of ancient European government indicates a strong ambivalence toward revolutionary sentiment.  It is perhaps a result of its proximity to the events of the French Revolution that its location within the latter years of the Age of Enlightenment is often overlooked.  During the Enlightenment, reliance upon God as a source of meaning had dissipated in favor of understanding humanity through itself. I will argue that The Monk's depiction of intensely oppressive, Godless religious societies suggests the consequences of this shift.  Without a connection to the sacred, humanity spirals toward damnation; the extremes of unconscious desire are inseparable from the individual and activate supernatural forces within the novel.  Lewis creates a scene akin to that of Original Sin in the Book of Genesis, wherein the consequences of succumbing to temptation are not only inevitable but inescapable: the fall of humankind is unavoidable, and God's absence renders redemption impossible.  Ultimately, the novel offers a reconstruction of the Biblical parable in a way that expresses ambivalence about a secularized, post-Enlightenment world from which events like those of the French Revolution can only be expected.

The fear of being unimportant, being erased, and of being finite, grips humans and motivates us to prove that we matter, that we exist. In an attempt to create truth and authentic understandings, our society seeks evidence, proof, and facts, even while acknowledging (and often ignoring) that these “facts” may be hard to establish. In my paper I explore how post-modern novels, Everything is Illuminated and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer and Austerlitz by W.G. Sebald, utilize multi-modal textual souvenirs to function as lodestones and guide readers through fictionalized versions of real historical traumas. These novels can be read as scrapbooks of memory which investigate the social importance and definition of “truth” in the face of traumatic events. My project questions whether or not truth can be found in fiction, non-fiction or even photographs as it looks at the way modern technologies have impacted how authors choose to create historical fiction. The multi-modal nature of these novels forces readers to reflect upon authorial intent and authority in the construction of memory and post memory. Furthermore, by looking at the narratives the authors create about traumatic events such as the Holocaust, the bombing of Dresden, Hiroshima, and the attacks of 9-11, my paper reveals the ways in which collective memories and national narratives can arise from trauma and how these events in turn create social identity for individuals within and across groups. An analysis of the postmodern methods the authors use in an attempt to create this authenticity, along with the expectations society holds concerning their construction, and the impact of individual and cultural desires on the creation of these narratives, uncovers the many fallacies and complexities that come with testimony and the social construction of authentic truth.

Ai WeiWei, a contemporary Chinese artist and self-described "dissident," is the first to admit that political activism forms the basis of his aesthetic. In an artist’s statement, from a recent exhibition at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, DC, Ai plainly stated: “I’ve always believed it is essential for contemporary artists to question established assumptions and challenge beliefs.” The majority of Ai’s installations at the Hirshhorn function as a platform for his renegade agenda, and his piece He Xie is no exception. The striking collection of ceramic river crabs, in various shades of red and brown, is invested with manifest symbolism. However, a deeper investigation of the work reveals a latent significance, not readily gleaned from a limited investigation of its formal elements. In order to adequately engage with Ai’s work, one must look beyond the surface and trace the installation back to its historical origins and cultural conditions. To draw out his strategic use of symbolism, I analyze Ai’s installation according to German art historian Erwin Panofsky's iconographical approach. Panofsky begins with the simplest translation of visual forms and works his way toward a more nuanced historical and culturally relevant perspective. In short, Panofsky’s three-pronged methodological approach allows me to demonstrate the complexity of Ai’s He Xie. In this presentation, I discuss the conceptual stimulus behind Ai's sprawling display of porcelain delicacies, exploring its political significance and identifying a larger metaphysical trend in the artist's career.

This talk explores African American cinema, and the ways black representations emerge in different commercial contexts to appeal to interracial audiences. Understanding independent “black cinema” as films that intend to resist voyeuristic spectatorship, this talk distinguishes the economic disparities between expressly black cinema versus commercial cinema that employs specific, trope-centered representations of black characters. This discussion pivots around Manthia Diawara’s theoretical framework from “Black Spectatorship: Problems of Identification and Resistance” (1988), which suggests that commercial films bearing the intent to propel negative narratives of African Americans can be viewed with a resistant, critical spectatorship by viewers of differing races. While Diawara is correct, and some directors have been producing more independent black cinematic works, this talk lays out the enduring economic boons and ramifications from continued voyeurism in black and commercial cinema. Pieces of cultural production addressed include Spike Lee’s Bamboozled (2000), Tyler Perry’s Madea franchise, Tate Taylor’s The Help (2011), Bruce Joel Rubin’s Ghost (1990), and variety television shows including Richard Pryor’s 1977 The Richard Pryor Show and Lorne Michaels’ Saturday Night Live (1975). Ultimately, this talk analyzes how box office gains and television ratings both reflect and interact with black iconography and representation. Through this undertaking, a better understanding can be had as to the extent of veracity and implication when black artist Ralph Ellison notes that, “Movies are not about Blacks but what Whites think about Blacks.”

Despite its negative associations with criminalized activities such as human trafficking, sex tourism, and prostitution, the modern mail-order bride industry continues to flourish – facilitating thousands of international marriages between “American men” (a category that includes all “Caucasian” or “Western” men) and foreign women (the majority of whom originate from Latin America, Eastern Europe and Southeast Asia). While there are legitimate factors tying the industry to the aforementioned criminal activities, my research will not dwell upon (nor will it altogether dismiss) a victim discourse in considering the life experiences of marriage migrants. Instead, my research will seek to recast women’s role in this international marriage-scape as agents who, despite institutional and structural limitations on their mobility and quality of life, manage to achieve forms of women empowerment through strategic participation in the international marriage market. In particular, I focus on women marriage migrants from the Philippines, a country of origin which, in being “formerly colonized by the United States, and currently neocolonized by U.S. corporate capital, best illustrates how colonial and military dominations are interwoven with sexual domination to provide the “ultimate Western male fantasy.” Part of an orientalist discourse, this “fantasy” posits Filipino women as politically passive, sexually exotic, and domestically compliant. My research utilizes the theoretical frameworks of Intersectionality and of Social Construction to examine how this “fantasy” combines sexualized racial stereotypes with racialized gender stereotypes to the harm of particularly Asian (and Asian Pacific American) women. Despite the various harm this colonial sexual mythology engenders, case studies, a literature review, and content analysis reveal Filipino marriage migrants to be empowered women who are strategically, creatively, and, oftentimes, successfully, utilizing the same colonial fantasy to their economic, social, and national advantage – a counter-narrative marked by processes of self-construction, participation in hypergamy, and the production of a corollary female fantasy.

What is the structure and effectiveness of our local bilingual education programs? Availability of effective bilingual education is still one of the most important issues Chicanos/as face today, especially here in the Yakima Valley. While we have become a majority minority district, bilingual services provided at many Valley public high schools have not advanced with the changing times. Additional support to our parents and limited-English students is needed to create strong parent engagement. By taking a closer look at flawed services provided by our public school agents, we can create awareness to aid in strengthening our education systems. Throughout this study, I will be looking for new ways of combating the lack of support to our parents and struggling English learners. A generalized view of this project includes analyzing my previous work experience at a local high school. The next step is to study the works of new and local agencies that support Bilingual Education including the work of Heritage University’s own, Patricia Valdez-Zontek. I also attempt to gather opinions from personnel of two leading supporters of Bilingual Education state wide: Migrant Student Data and Recruitment center (MSDR) and Secondary Education for Migrant Youth (SEMY). As a result of this study, I anticipate to deliver strong and detailed facts about what works and what doesn’t, and more importantly about what is lacking and what can be done to better involve parents in support of non-English speaking students in our schools.

How did the Indian English novel function within the Indian independence movement? Literature illuminates unique narratives not necessarily communicated by other forms of print media like newspapers and history books, and these stories exert a very different kind of influence. In the particular instance of Indian English novels around the time that India gained independence from Britain, literature established power through its inherent cultural capital, its role in imagining nations, and its critical abilities. These novels embodied traits of both the colonized and the colonizer, allowing them to occupy a position of notable political and cultural influence. Drawing on theories on literature and nationalism, this study employs close readings of novels by Rabindranath Tagore and Mulk Raj Anand within the context of historically evident politics and cultural phenomena of the time period to explain the role Indian English novels played in revolutionizing India. An understanding of the factors enabling the novel’s influence will illuminate how India’s independence was imagined and realized. Situating Indian English novels of the Indian independence movement in their historical and social context may yield further understanding to the way historical events played out and reveal more of literature’s effect on the societies in which it is produced.

This research examines the relationship between an individual’s beliefs about authority and purity when making moral decisions and an individual’s alcohol consumption, specifically whether those who strongly identify with purity or authority consume more or less alcohol than those who do not. This is important to consider because few studies have looked at the relationship between moral considerations and alcohol consumption. We hypothesized that those who place comparatively less emphasis on authority and purity when making decisions about what is morally right would report higher levels of alcohol consumption. Participants (N=860; 41% male, 59% female) completed an online screening as a part of a larger study. Primarily, we focused on the Moral Foundations Questionnaire (Graham et al., 2011), in particular the authority and purity subscales. In addition, we considered the Daily Drinking Questionnaire (Collins, Parks, & Marlatt, 1985), Quantity/Frequency Measure (Marlatt, Baer, & Larimer, 1995), and whether participants met criteria for heavy episodic drinking (NIAAA, 2004). Preliminary analyses indicated that there is statistically significant negative correlation between alcohol consumption and authority as well as purity. These findings may extend our understanding of how treatment and prevention programs can target individuals that place relatively less importance on purity or authority. Future research is necessary to determine how authority and purity considerations with moral decisions can be used to better understand college students’ risky alcohol consumption.

During the last glaciation (18,000–13,000 years ago) a lobe of the Cordilleran Ice Sheet advanced into the Puget Lowland, scouring and sculpting the previous landscape into the present-day topography. Prior to the Puget Lobe’s advance, Cascadian alpine glacial systems had reached their maximum extent and were depositing large volumes of sediment into the Puget Lowland basin. While the extensive glacio-fluvial deposits that are preserved in the Puget Lowland indicate a thick sequence of sediment had filled the basin prior to the Puget Lobe’s advance, there has been no previous research on the source (or provenance) of these sediments. Much of this outwash sediment is currently attributed to the Puget Lobe, although a significant volume was likely deposited by Cascadian glacier sources prior to the Puget Lobe’s advance. I have collected samples from glacio-fluvial sediment and Puget Lobe till at bluff exposures on Whidbey Island, as well as alluvium from present-day Cascadian river drainages (a proxy for paleo-Cascadian glacio-fluvial outwash) that can be used to obtain a modal analysis of the basin fill. I analyze these samples using a microprobe to evaluate the proportional occurrence of source-indicative minerals in order to determine the provenance of Puget Lowland sediments. My expected results are for minerals present in the Cascadian drainage sediments, e.g., garnets, to occur in larger proportions than in the Puget Lobe sediments due to source-bedrock composition. For example, the result of high garnet (or other indicator mineral) content in Lowland sediments would indicate that the sediment was deposited by Cascadian glacio-fluvial source rather than by the Puget Lobe, redefining which depositional units are attributed to each source. Knowing the relative volumes of sediment deposited by these two sources will allow me to calculate alpine versus continental glacier sedimentations rates in the region during the last glacial maximum.