In her letters to Descartes, Princess Elizabeth of Bohemia asks a question that many modern philosophers have tried to answer: "Given that the soul of a human being is only a thinking substance, how can it affect the bodily spirits, in order to bring about voluntary action?" Here Elizabeth questions the very nature of the relationship between mind and body. It is not easily understood or explained how a nonphysical substance can affect or be affected by a physical substance in order to create both sensations and voluntary movement. Through the attempts to find solutions to this problem, it becomes clear that the true problem lies in Descartes' separation of the nonphysical mind and the physical body within the idea of a person. Drawing from Spinoza, Locke, and Hobbes, I argue that mind and body are simply two ways of understanding a single, indivisible human being.

Intentionality is defined as the characteristic of having thoughts that represent and refer to things in the world. While some current research suggests apes can be said to have intentionality, traditionally intentionality is a hallmark of being human. How do we come to know that an intelligent organism or system is intentional? In this presentation I will argue that an artificial system that can be described as having the same computational and algorithmic levels as a human system has the same intelligence and is plausibly intentional. This is because if the qualities we attribute intentionality towards in a human system are programmed in an artificial system, we would attribute intentionality to an artificial system in the same way we would to a human system. So, we should consider the artificial system plausibly intentional. To explain how this works I will discuss David Marr’s tri-level hypothesis and Turing’s ideas about intelligence and intentionality to show that an artificial system that has the same intelligence as a human system also has intentionality. I will then show how under the Physical Symbol System Hypothesis attributing intentionality may be another intelligent behavior we can computationally model.

Ecofeminism is a movement which shows how the marginalization and subjugation of women by men parallels the domination and exploitation of nature by human beings. Interdisciplinary at its inception, ecofeminism draws from a wide range of fields including philosophy, ecology, english, and gender studies. Sometimes though, the values of these different fields conflict with one another in ways that question whether some theories can (or should) be put into practice. Queer ecocriticism, pioneered by Timothy Morton, is one such theory. Queer ecocriticism attempts to fuse ecological criticism with queer theory to challenge essentialist views of women and nature in existing environmentalisms. In Queer Ecology, Morton suggests that subjects only appear to fit neatly into stable categories like “women,” “humans,” and “nature” because we fail to perceive them on larger timescales. The best approach to environmentalism, he argues, is one which contemplates “ecology's unfathomable” and “almost unbearable” intimacies—that is, one which recognizes our world as a cacophony of interrelated, messy, and untotalizable “strange strangers” rather than a mere collection of discrete beings who can be categorized. What this “contemplation” means in practice, however, is unclear. Moreover, queer ecology appears difficult to reconcile with environmental activism, which often organizes strategically under essentialist labels like "women" or “human beings” to protect "nature." So what is the interdisciplinary-conscious ecofeminist to do? Drawing from the work of ecofeminists Sherry Ortner and Val Plumwood, queer theorists, and environmental activists, my project investigates ways in which ecofeminist activism might incorporate queer ecocritical theory into practice. If it’s true that, as Morton says, ecofeminism “is grounded on binary difference and [is] thus unhelpful for the kinds of difference multiplication that is queer theory’s brilliance,” activism informed by queer ecocriticism might be able to achieve its aims without relying on problematic, essentialist views of women and nature.

Ramsey Theory is an intricate field of pure mathematics, but it also has applications in computer science, where graphs are commonlu used as data structures. Every pair of "forbidden" graphs has a Ramsey number, which indicates when one of those graphs must occur. A Ramsey number for a pair of forbidden graphs is the smallest number of points R for which every edge-coloring of the complete graph on R points includes one of the forbidden graphs in its respective color. In this paper we use two original methods to find and prove new Ramsey number formulas for certain tadpole graphs based upon known Ramsey number formulas for arbitrary cycle graphs.  A tadpole graph Qn,t is formed by connecting one end of a path graph on t points (called the “tail”) to a cycle of size n (called the “head”). A pan graph Qn is defined as a tadpole graph with t=1. We first use an intuitive counting method to prove exact Ramsey number formulas for all “near-diagonal” pan graphs, i.e. those pairs of pan graphs where the maximum cycle size of the pair is no more than 5/2 times the minimum cycle size. Then, we demonstrate a number-theoretic method to find exact Ramsey numbers for arbitrarily far-from-diagonal tadpole pairs with arbitrarily long tails. However, the second method requires that the tadpoles meet number-theoretic constraints (rather than size constraints). For example, in the diagonal cases, n-1 must be relatively prime to n+t, where either n-1 has an odd order (mod n+t) or the additive inverse of n-1 has an even index relative to n-1 (mod n+t). These “scattered” on- and off-diagonal results provide upper bounds on the Ramsey numbers for other tadpole pairs that fail to meet the number-theoretic constraints.

The work of tutors in the Odegaard Writing & Research Center requires continual adaptation of practices to accommodate and collaborate with writers who range from incoming freshmen to tenured faculty, come from more than 150 different departments and programs, speak more than 80 different home languages, and may visit at any stage of the writing process. Successful interactions require that undergraduate tutors thoughtfully enact writing center scholarship that itself tends to be quite abstract and axiomatic: for example “make better writers, not better papers”. As researchers, we asked: How might communication tools borrowed from other fields help tutors mediate the disconnect between writing center theory/pedagogy and writers’ (sometimes conflicting) expectations? We hypothesized that tutors’ ability to so mediate would be improved by acquisition of concrete active-listening and reflective-responding skills; such skills might enable them to more confidently navigate the endlessly shifting terrain of a tutoring session. To identify needed skills, we reviewed scholarship from legal mediation, nursing, psychology, composition, and social work. To assess the realities of tutor practices -- how practices do and do not align with the pedagogical mission of a writing center -- we surveyed tutors to assess their key concerns, observed tutoring sessions, and created transcripts. Our preliminary findings indicate a considerable gap between writing center theory and practice, despite tutors’ own articulated goals and best intentions. In response, we have undertaken additional research into non-defensive communication strategies and begun to develop and test new training and education materials for fellow tutors. We hope to offer better ways to practically enact ideals of collaborative learning. What we’ve learned through our research to date shows both considerable promise toward this end and value to myriad teaching and learning groups.

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.

"Gloving" or "light-gloving" is the art of manipulating light by means of the hands. Typically, LED microlights are affixed to stretch gloves. The placement of lights on the gloves varies; thumb lights and palm lights are optional. My multimedia presentation links the improvisational movement techniques of light-gloving to the improvisational lines, digressions and interpolations a jazz musician introduces and explores in a solo. In the video portion of my presentation, I and Tom Shellum each take "solos" using light glove techniques on the composition, "Rear Control," by a quartet led by drummer Matt Wilson. Our independent styles of light-gloving are much like the independent lines of improvisation between one jazz musician and another. Each of us picks up on different cues from the music. We are improvising on improvisation. Light-gloving is, after all, an improvisational art form; like jazz, its essence is found in spontaneous creation.

Evaluative priming (EP) is an unobtrusive measure of attitude.  Participants' responses to a target stimulus (a face) are either facilitated or slowed by immediate prior exposure to a prime (pleasant or unpleasant word). If pleasant primes ellicit speedy responses to faces of one social category more so than faces of another, this is interpreted as preference for the first category. Unfortunately, EP has been plagued by low internal consistency, reliability and convergent validity with other measures. The present project proposes a modification to EP procedure, known as homogeneous blocks priming (HBP). In HBP, prime-target pairs consistent with prevailing attitudes (such as pleasant+young and unpleasant+old) are presented in one block, while prime-target pairs that are inconsistent with prevailing attitudes (pleasant+old and unpleasant+young) are presented in a different block. Previous research has hinted that HBP will outperform traditional EP procedures, but they have never been compared within the same experiment. The present experiment tests age attitudes using a traditional EP measure, the new HBP measure, and an Implicit Association Test (IAT), a much more widely used implicit measure of attitude. HBP and traditional EP will be compared on the basis of internal consistency, reliability, and correlation with the IAT. The study is ongoing now, but pilot data reveal that the HBP task correlates more strongly with the IAT than EP does, and the HBP effect size is especially strong for participants who respond very rapidly.