Science and Technology Studies Commons^™

In Search Of Psychiatric Kinds: Natural Kinds And Natural Classification In Psychiatry, Nicholas Slothouber

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

In recent years both philosophers and scientists have asked whether or not our current kinds of mental disorder—e.g., schizophrenia, depression, bipolar disorder—are natural kinds; and, moreover, whether or not the search for natural kinds of mental disorder is a realistic desideratum for psychiatry. In this dissertation I clarify the sense in which a kind can be said to be “natural” or “real” and argue that, despite a few notable exceptions, kinds of mental disorder cannot be considered natural kinds. Furthermore, I contend that psychopathological phenomena do not cluster together into kinds in the way that paradigmatic natural kinds (e.g., chemical …

9th Annual Postdoctoral Science Symposium, University Of Texas Md Anderson Cancer Center Postdoctoral Association

Annual Postdoctoral Science Symposium Abstracts

The mission of the Annual Postdoctoral Science Symposium (APSS) is to provide a platform for talented postdoctoral fellows throughout the Texas Medical Center to present their work to a wider audience. The MD Anderson Postdoctoral Association convened its inaugural Annual Postdoctoral Science Symposium (APSS) on August 4, 2011.

The APSS provides a professional venue for postdoctoral scientists to develop, clarify, and refine their research as a result of formal reviews and critiques of faculty and other postdoctoral scientists. Additionally, attendees discuss current research on a broad range of subjects while promoting academic interactions and enrichment and developing new collaborations.

Animal Pain And The Social Role Of Science, Leslie Irvine

Leslie Irvine, PhD

Assuming that all animals are sentient would mean ending their use in most scientific research. This does not necessarily imply an unscientific or anti-scientific stance. Examining the social role of science reveals its considerable investment in preserving the status quo, including the continued use of animal subjects. From this perspective, the use of animal subjects is a custom that science could move beyond, rather than a methodological requirement that it must defend.

Do Corporate Owned Adaptive Learning Platforms Perpetuate Banking Style Learning? Integrating Technology For Activism Into Transformational Sustainability Education, Tina M. Garner

Leadership for Sustainability Education Comprehensive Papers

We live in a world that tends to be controlled by corporations. The public school system should be wary of the problems that corporate control has on education. Even though public schools should not have corporate influence, the fact remains that they do, and this perpetuates Freire's banking style learning. Through time, the corporate influence in education was through educational materials such as book sales. Since the decline of the use of books and the growth of the use of technologies, corporations have followed suit through the sales of Adaptive Learning Platforms. Through leveraging the technology which students enjoy using, …

Iamhappy: Towards An Iot Knowledge-Based Cross-Domain Well-Being Recommendation System For Everyday Happiness, Amelia Gyrard, Amit Sheth

Kno.e.sis Publications

Nowadays, healthy lifestyle, fitness, and diet habits have become central applications in our daily life. Positive psychology such as well-being and happiness is the ultimate dream of everyday people’s feelings (even without being aware of it). Wearable devices are being increasingly employed to support well-being and fitness. Those devices produce physiological signals that are analyzed by machines to understand emotions and physical state. The Internetof Things (IoT) technology connects (wearable) devices to the Internet to easily access and process data, even using Web technologies (aka Web of Things).

We design IAMHAPPY, an innovative IoT-based well-being recommendation system to encourage every …

Cultivating Knowledge: Agrarian Science And Ecological Engagements In Southern Ontario Agriculture, Kelly Linton

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Agriculture and climate change are interconnected processes, with agriculture implicated in rising green house gas emissions, deforestation, soil and water pollution, and reductions in biodiversity. Conversely, changes within ecology (including a warming climate), alter growing conditions for farmers. Farmers face changes in both temperature and precipitation, as well as an increase in adverse weather events that significantly threaten productivity and livelihoods.

Based on 40 unstructured interviews as well as informal conversations conducted among farmers in southern Ontario, Canada between the spring of 2014 and the winter of 2017, this dissertation seeks to contribute to a growing body of work that …

What Can We Do? Puzzling Over The Interpretation Of Heredity And Variation From Galton To Genetic Engineering, Peter J. Taylor

Working Papers on Science in a Changing World

First six chapters of a book motivated as follows: When I had mentioned to colleagues that I was exploring some significant issues overlooked by both sides in nature-nurture debates, the typical response was “we know, of course, that nature and nurture are intertwined”; they never asked “which nature-nurture science are you referring to?” It occurred to me that, in the long history of nature-nurture debates, opposing sides had always assumed or implied that these different scientific approaches were speaking to the same issues. If that were the case, then the challenge—something I was already puzzling over—was how best to draw …

A Combined Fmri And Dti Examination Of Functional Language Lateralization And Arcuate Fasciculus Structure: Effects Of Degree Versus Direction Of Hand Preference Author Links Open Overlay Panel, Ruth E. Propper, Lauren J. O'Donnell, Stephen Whalen, Yanmei Tie, Isaiah Norton, Ralph O. Suarez, Lilla Zollei, Alireza Radmanesh, Alexandra Golby

Ruth Propper

The present study examined the relationship between hand preference degree and direction, functional language lateralization in Broca’s and Wernicke’s areas, and structural measures of the arcuate fasciculus. Results revealed an effect of degree of hand preference on arcuate fasciculus structure, such that consistently-handed individuals, regardless of the direction of hand preference, demonstrated the most asymmetric arcuate fasciculus, with larger left versus right arcuate, as measured by DTI. Functional language lateralization in Wernicke’s area, measured via fMRI, was related to arcuate fasciculus volume in consistent-left-handers only, and only in people who were not right hemisphere lateralized for language; given the …

The Social Construction Of Life: Critical Thinking About Biology In Society, Peter J. Taylor

Working Papers on Science in a Changing World

This book aims to expand the boundaries of the influences that readers consider when interpreting the practices and products of the life sciences ("biology") and their impact on society. The chapter topics include: Interpreting Ideas of Nature; The structure of origin stories; Multiple layers in influencing an audience: The case of Darwin's On the Origin of Species; Metaphors of coordination and development; What causes a disease?—the consequences of hereditarianism in the case of pellagra; How changeable are IQ test scores?; Social negotiations around genetic screening; Intersecting processes involving genes and environment.

Each chapter consists of 5 parts:

1. Introduce simple …

Question Answering For Suicide Risk Assessment Using Reddit, Amanuel Alambo, Usha Lokala, Ugur Kursuncu, Krishnaprasad Thirunarayan, Amelia Gyrard, Randon S. Welton, Jyotishman Pathak, Amit P. Sheth

Kno.e.sis Publications

Mental Health America designed ten questionnaires that are used to determine the risk of mental disorders. They are also commonly used by Mental Health Professionals (MHPs) to assess suicidality. Specifically, the Columbia Suicide Severity Rating Scale (C-SSRS), a widely used suicide assessment questionnaire, helps MHPs determine the severity of suicide risk and offer an appropriate treatment. A major challenge in suicide treatment is the social stigma wherein the patient feels reluctance in discussing his/her conditions with an MHP, which leads to inaccurate assessment and treatment of patients. On the other hand, the same patient is comfortable freely discussing his/her mental …

Empathi: An Ontology For Emergency Managing And Planning About Hazard Crisis, Manas Gaur, Kaeedeh Shekarpour, Amelia Gyrard, Amit P. Sheth

Kno.e.sis Publications

In the domain of emergency management during hazard crises, having sufficient situational awareness information is critical. It requires capturing and integrating information from sources such as satellite images, local sensors and social media content generated by local people.
A bold obstacle to capturing, representing and integrating such heterogeneous and diverse information is lack of a proper ontology which properly conceptualizes this domain, aggregates and unifies datasets. Thus, in this paper, we introduce empathi ontology which conceptualizes the core concepts describing the domain of emergency managing and planning of hazard crises.
Although empathi has a coarse-grained view, it considers the necessary …

Adaptive Knowledge Networks: A Time Capsule, Swati Padhee, Anurag Illendula, Amit Sheth, Krishnaprasad Thirunarayan, Valerie L. Shalin

Kno.e.sis Publications

❖ Real world events are dynamic in nature Periodic events e.g. US Presidential Election Non-periodic events e.g. Cyclone Idai

❖ Need for real-time predictive analysis, trend analysis, spatio-temporal decision making, public opinion analysis for events.

❖ Current state-of-the-art curates dynamic knowledge graph from structured text.

❖ We propose creating an Adaptive Knowledge Network from incoming real-time multimodal spatio-temporally evolving data.

Automatic Identification Of Individual Drugs In Death Certificates, Soon Jye Kho, Amit Sheth, Olivier Bodenreider

Kno.e.sis Publications

Background:

Establishing trends of drug overdoses requires the identification of individual drugs in death certificates, not supported by coding with the International Classification of Diseases. However, identifying drug mentions from the literal portion of death certificates remains challenging due to the variability of drug names.

Objectives:

To automatically identify individual drugs in death certificates.

Methods:

We use RxNorm to collect variants for drug names (generic names, synonyms, brand names) and we algorithmically generate common misspellings. We use this automatically compiled list to identify drug mentions from 703,106 death certificates and compare the performance of our automated approach to that of …