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Easterner, Vol. 65, No. 30, June 4, 2014, Associated Students Of Eastern Washington University

Student Newspapers

This issue of the Easterner contains articles about the top stories of the year, a fall course to improve prison literacy, student and entrepreneur Mohammed Abdulaal, students studying in London for an international master's degree, alumnus Mark Anderson, a showcase for senior film theses, new men's basketball assistant David Riley, football player Allen Brown, the EEEWOO awards, and track and field athletes participation at the NCAA regionals.

Toward A Biocommunicable Cartography Of Health Decision-Making In The Amazon Basin Of Ecuador, James Cartwright

Lawrence University Honors Projects

This paper comprises a critical, ethnographic study of health communication in a rural community of Amazonian Ecuador. By synthesizing approaches from anthropology, discourse studies, and public health, the study explores how conversations influence health decisions, how communities understand health systems, and how macrostructural discourse changes the political economy of healthcare in Ecuador. My work draws on the recent theoretical development of ‘biocommunicability’ in anthropology as well as earlier sociological research on knowledge construction. Most importantly, this paper offers a critique of current interventions by NGOs in the region.

An Evaluation Of The Accuracy Of Online Translation Systems, Milam Aiken, Kaushik Ghosh, John Wee, Mahesh Vanjani

Communications of the IIMA

Until fairly recently, translation among a large variety of natural languages has been difficult and costly. Now, several free, Web-based machine translation (MT) services can provide support, but relatively little research has been conducted on their accuracies. A study of four of these services using German-to-English and Spanish-to-English translations showed that Google Translate appeared to be superior. Further study using this system alone showed that while translations were not always perfect, their understandability was quite high.

An Ontology-Based Collaborative Knowledge Management Network To Enhance The Reusability Of Inter-Organizational Knowledge, Nelson K.Y. Leung, Sim Kim Lau, Joshua Fan

Communications of the IIMA

A number of knowledge management (KM) approaches based on individual organizational KM strategies and business requirements have been developed without taking system interoperation into consideration. In this paper, a collaborative inter-organizational KM network is proposed to allow various organizations to access and retrieve inter-organizational knowledge. While knowledge engineers can reuse the inter-organizational knowledge to create and evaluate its own organizational knowledge, general users benefit from the effectiveness and efficiency of searching for relevant inter-organizational knowledge within the network

Knowledge Management And Information Technology: Enablers Of E-Commerce Development, Muhammed A. Badamas

Communications of the IIMA

Information and Communication Technologies provide the platform for development across economic and other sectors. Knowledge and information are interconnected. The effective use of information and knowledge, however, depend on the availability of an efficient information technology. This in turn will accelerate the establishment of e-commerce in developing economies. This paper examines the relationship between knowledge, information, information technology and how they can be enablers for the development of e-commerce in Africa

An Exploration Into The Desire For Creative And Innovative Methods Of Investigative Educative Research Through The Medium Of The 'Curated Meal'., Emma Clarke

Dublin Gastronomy Symposium

No abstract provided.

Stories Of Success: Understanding Academic Achievement Of Hispanic Students In Science, Amanda Harris

Dissertations and Theses

A review of the literature shows that there is much evidence to suggest the challenges facing Hispanic students in American public schools. Hispanic enrollment in K-12 public schools has increased from 6 to 19% in the last thirty years, yet schools have not made adequate adjustments to accommodate this changing population. Issues such as remedial tracking and cultural differences have led to low high school graduate rates for Hispanic students and inequities in schooling experiences (Gay, 2000). Particularly in the area of science, Hispanic students struggle with academic success (Cole & Espinoza, 2008). Despite these obstacles, some Hispanic students are …

The Relative Impact Of Identity On Lgbt Api Outness: A Quantitative Analysis, Jessica Lee

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In the United States, the intersecting relationship among race, sex, gender, and sexuality plays a significant role in one's identity development and socialization. Especially for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) Asian Pacific Islander (API) individuals, such interplay presents a continuous task of processing and presenting different identities. Employing a national sample of over 500 LGBT API individuals and utilizing multivariate regression analysis, this thesis explores how LGBT API individuals' sexual and racial identities affect their decisions in coming out to family, friends, co-workers, and other community members. Findings indicate that the level of discomfort in racial/ethnic and/or LGBT community …

Altmetrics Is An Indication Of Quality Research Or Just Hot Topics, Chia Yew Boon, Joan Wee Jee Foon

Proceedings of the IATUL Conferences

With the widespread use of social media tools in the discovery, dissemination and discussion of research output, altmetric measurements are fast gaining popularity and they supplement the traditional research metrics by tracking the number of social mentions of research articles. In recent years, there a few such tools and they adopt different models and have different coverage. Publishers such as Scopus and PLoS have already incorporated altmetrics in their websites. This paper seeks to make sense of these available tools and evaluate their effectiveness. Do they identify quality research or just HOT topics? This paper also analyses most cited papers …

Effects Of Phonological Neighborhood Density On Lexical Access In Adults And Children With And Without Specific Language Impairment, Diana Almodovar

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The present study was designed to examine how adults, children with typical language development (TLD), and children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI) process words from sparse and dense phonological neighborhoods, using the Cross Modal Picture-Word Interference Paradigm. The participants were asked to label a picture presented on a computer screen, while ignoring auditory distractors (interfering words or IWs) presented over headphones. The target items were manipulated according to neighborhood density (high and low density words), and the auditory distractors were either identical to the target, a neutral distractor (good), phonologically related (by rhyme), or unrelated to the target item. The …

Don't Push Me Over The (Knowl)Edge: The Social Correlates Of Latino High School Dropouts, Robert Charles Baskerville

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

According to the forecast of the US Census Bureau, Latinos are the largest, fastest-growing ethnic group within the United States today and will comprise the majority of the US labor force sometime during the mid-21st century. Yet today, the youth of this diverse segment of the population are plagued by alarmingly high high school dropout rates, about double that of African-Americans youth and triple that of white youth. This yawning disparity prompts the examination of the social conditions contributing to this social crisis. How do demographic, aspirational, school-level, and socioeconomic variables affect the decision that so many Latino youth make …

Between Sites: Critical Convergences At The Personal, Interpersonal, And Institutional Levels In A Service Learning Course, Kendra Rashaun Brewster

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Set within the context of the increasing emphasis on civic engagement and transformative education, this work addresses service learning as a form of civic engagement that holds both the risks of acriticality and critical potential. This study examines the capacity for the critical consciousness and relationality that define the primary commitments of critical service learning (see Kinefuchi, 2010). Thus, this study is grounded in the ways that the circuits of privilege and dispossession were breached in a service learning course where college students travelled to mentor adolescent girls who were in a secure residential facility. The narratives of former service …

Huu-Fa Thesis Dat?: A Syntactic Analysis Of Possessive Jamaican Creole Possessive Wh-Elements, Toni Ashlie Foster

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis discusses the differences between the Jamaican Creole expressions huu-fa and fi-huu. Jamaican Creole is a language that was born from a combination of the lexifier language English and the substrate language Twi, therefore it is reasonable to check whether the features of JC were derived from these languages. The distribution of huu-fa and fi-huu resembles the distribution of English whose. Fi-huu and huu-fa are WH-elements that show possession, similar to the English word whose. They are made of a WH-pronoun and a form of the preposition fi "for". Both terms differ in internal structure, and distribution. The difference …

Translator, Traitor: A Critical Ethnography Of A U.S. Terrorism Trial, Maya Hess

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Historically, the role of translators and interpreters has suffered from multiple misconceptions. In theaters of war, these linguists are often viewed as traitors and kidnapped, tortured, or killed; if they work in the terrorism arena, they may be prosecuted and convicted as terrorist agents. In United States v. Ahmed Abdel Sattar, a/k/a "Abu Omar," a/k/a "Dr. Ahmed," Lynne Stewart, and Mohammed [sic] Yousry, 02 Cr. 395 (JGK) (S.D.N.Y. 2003), Yousry, an Arabic linguist and scholar of Middle Eastern history, was labeled such an agent, his work as translator/interpreter construed as material support to terrorism, and his expertise recast as dangerous …

Reading Nation In Translation: The Spectral Transnationality Of The Malaysian Racial Imaginary, Fiona Hsiao Yen Lee

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In recent decades, literary studies has experienced a global turn, often understood as a move beyond national paradigms of analysis, which are deemed to be narrow and particularistic. Although wary of the tacit universalizing tendencies of global frames, scholars of race and postcoloniality have critically embraced the global by arguing for the need to theorize transnationalism from marginalized perspectives. However, casting the global and the national in oppositional terms ignores the fact that national racial ideologies both actively shape and are shaped by globally circulating ideas about race. An understudied site in postcolonial studies, Malaysia--formerly known as Malaya--is an exemplary …

Ethnic Language Maintenance: A Case Study Of Second-Generation Iranian Americans In The Northeastern States, Maryam Moeini Meybodi

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

As a relatively new, highly educated and professional group, Iranian Americans show distinctive language usage patterns. Using data from the American Community Survey (ACS) and 48 interviews with East Coast Iranian Americans, this thesis explores the attitudes and behavior of children of Iranian immigrants and their parents toward learning and preserving their native language: Persian. Although the literature points to the erosion of parental language among the second generation and its extinction by the third generation, the results of this study suggest otherwise, at least for young children. Findings show that parents and children had positive attitude and behavior toward …

Echolocation: Using Word-Burst Analysis To Rescore Keyword Search Candidates In Low-Resource Languages, Justin Richards

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

State of the art technologies for speech recognition are very accurate for heavily studied languages like English. They perform poorly, though, for languages wherein the recorded archives of speech data available to researchers are relatively scant. In the context of these low-resource languages, the task of keyword search within recorded speech is formidable. We demonstrate a method that generates more accurate keyword search results on low-resource languages by studying a pattern not exploited by the speech recognizer. The word-burst, or burstiness, pattern is the tendency for word utterances to appear together in bursts as conversational topics fluctuate. We give evidence …

On The Same Page: The Strong Teacher Professional Community At The Heart Of A Good New York City Public Middle School, Nathan Warner

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation analyzes how one high-functioning, public, non-selective middle school in New York City, the Washington Heights Expeditionary Learning School (WHEELS/MS348), consistently gets strong student achievement gains. For the past three years, WHEELS has ranked near the top of all middle schools on the New York City Department of Education (NYCDOE) School Progress Reports, which measure student academic growth and performance in each school. At the same time its students, assigned randomly and coming from the neighborhood catchment zone, rank in the bottom decile in terms of economic advantage, and the bottom quartile in terms of elementary school academic performance …

From The Bx To A Ba: Latino Male Students And The Transition From High School To College, Alejandro Eduardo Carrion

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This study aims to provide a counter narrative to the deficit filled discourse surrounding Latino males by informing teachers, policymakers and researchers of the barriers and resources encountered by this population as they make the transition from high school to college. A qualitative research design was utilized for this study, which focused on 10 Latino males who mainly identified as Puerto Rican and Dominican, from the Bronx. Bourdieu's Theory of Practice, and his theoretical tools of field (structures), habitus (dispositions) and capital (social, cultural and economic), was used as the theoretical framework guiding this study. Participants shared the nuances of …

Foreseeing Identity In Blank Interstices: New-Wave African Migration To The United States And A New Theory Of Diaspora, Bernard D. Lombardi

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In this thesis, I explore the ways by which new-wave black African immigrants confront and negotiate American tropes of blackness for individual and collective identity formations. Specifically, I focus on the memory of slavery as it is used for black collectivity in the United States. I argue that, although new-wave black African immigrants do not share the same memory of slavery with the descendants of slaves, they experience the racism perpetuated from the period of slavery because of their phenotypical blackness. In addition, these immigrants bring to the United States new memories and understandings of Africa that transform the ways …

The Influence Of Pseudo-Relatives On Attachment Preferences In Spanish, David Branco-Moreno

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This paper presents the results from an off-line experiment on the extent to which the availability of pseudo-relatives modulates attachment preferences in Spanish. Participants were presented with sentences in which different syntactic and semantic factors had been manipulated to allow for either both a pseudo-relative (PR) and a relative-clause (RC) reading or a RC reading only. All the experimental items included two potential antecedents with which the constituents of interest could be associated. The experimental items can be divided into four groups: group 1 consists of stimuli allowing for a double reading in direct object position, and groups 2, 3 …

Temporal Information Extraction And Knowledge Base Population, Taylor Cassidy

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Temporal Information Extraction (TIE) from text plays an important role in many Natural Language Processing and Database applications. Many features of the world are time-dependent, and rich temporal knowledge is required for a more complete and precise understanding of the world. In this thesis we address aspects of two core tasks in TIE. First, we provide a new corpus of labeled temporal relations between events and temporal expressions, dense enough to facilitate a change in research directions from relation classification to identification, and present a system designed to address corresponding new challenges. Second, we implement a novel approach for the …

The Sound Patterns Of Camuno: Description And Explanation In Evolutionary Phonology, Michela Cresci

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation presents a linguistic study of the sound patterns of Camuno framed within Evolutionary Phonology (Blevins, 2004, 2006, to appear). Camuno is a variety of Eastern Lombard, a Romance language of northern Italy, spoken in Valcamonica. Camuno is not a local variety of Italian, but a sister of Italian, a local divergent development of the Latin originally spoken in Italy (Maiden & Perry, 1997, p. 2). It is an oral language with no writing system, and it is endangered. The language is understudied (Bonfadini, 1995, p. 26), and this thesis appears to be the first detailed study of Camuno …

Integration Or Interrogation? Franco-Maghrebi Rap And Hip-Hop Culture In Marseille, Jenna Catherine Daley

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This paper focuses on rap and hip-hop music that is produced from Franco-Maghrebi communities living in Marseille. The discussion revolves around the question of how rap music helps these communities to assimilate into French culture. The conclusion is two-fold. Marseille, as a city whose urban planning promotes physical assimilation of immigrants with French-born citizens, performs as an integrative force for these communities. Additionally, rap simultaneously assists Franco-Maghrebis in integrating into and subverting from French society. Franco-Maghrebi rappers integrate by becoming a part of mainstream French culture. Yet, they also subvert by extraordinarily placing race and discrimination at the forefront of …

Automated Classification Of Argument Stance In Student Essays: A Linguistically Motivated Approach With An Application For Supporting Argument Summarization, Adam Robert Faulkner

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This study describes a set of document- and sentence-level classification models designed to automate the task of determining the argument stance (for or against) of a student argumentative essay and the task of identifying any arguments in the essay that provide reasons in support of that stance. A suggested application utilizing these models is presented which involves the automated extraction of a single-sentence summary of an argumentative essay. This summary sentence indicates the overall argument stance of the essay from which the sentence was extracted and provides a representative argument in support of that stance.

A novel set …

Moral Motivation And The Authority Of Morality: A Defense Of Naturalist Moral Realism, Lily Eva Frank

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Moral realism has been continuously accused of positing the existence of queer properties, facts, judgments, and beliefs. One of these queer features is supposed to be the normative force of morality-that is the way in which morality guides our actions. Critics of moral realism argue that nothing else in the world has this feature. This is a reason to doubt that moral facts and properties exist at all. This objection can be interpreted in at least two ways. One way to interpret it has to do with moral motivation, this is the internalism objection. The other has to do with …

Yes We Can: A Dyadic Investigation Of Cognitive Interdependence, Relationship Communication, And Optimal Behavioral Health Outcomes Among Hiv Serodiscordant Same-Sex Male Couples, Kristine Elizabeth Gamarel

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Research suggests that couples who adopt a "we" orientation in relation to illness demonstrate greater resiliency and an increased capacity to cope with stressors. HIV serodiscordant couples (one partner is HIV-positive, the other is HIV-negative) have been identified as a critical mode of HIV transmission. The present study integrates dyadic coping models and interdependence theory to examine whether cognitive interdependence (i.e., the extent to which couples include aspects of their partner into their self-concept) and communication strategies are associated with sexual behavior, antiretroviral therapy (ART) adherence, depressive symptoms, sexual satisfaction, and relationship satisfaction. The study also tested whether the associations …

Speech Act Theoretic Semantics, Daniel W. Harris

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

I defend the view that linguistic meaning is a relation borne by an expression to a type of speech act, and that this relation holds in virtue of our overlapping communicative dispositions, and not in virtue of linguistic conventions. I argue that this theory gives the right account of the semantics-pragmatics interface and the best-available semantics for non-declarative clauses, and show that it allows for the construction of a rigorous compositional semantic theory with greater explanatory power than both truth-conditional and dynamic semantics.

Assembling Autism, Kate Suzanne Jenkins

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Autism is a growing social concern because of the epidemic-like growth in diagnoses among children. The lives and experiences of adults who have an autism diagnosis, however, are not as well documented. This dissertation project seeks to resolve that dearth of research. I conducted a year of participant observation at four locations of social, self-advocacy, and peer to peer support groups. I also conducted interviews with leaders and participants. I also participated (as a researcher) in an experiment in social skills acquisition led by participants from my ethnographic field work, fulfilling the planned participatory action research component of my original …

"We Are Refugees In Our Own Homeland": Land Dispossession And Resettlement Challenges In Post-Conflict Teso, Uganda, Matt Kandel

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation is based off of fieldwork that I conducted in post-conflict Teso region in northeastern Uganda from 2012-2013. It focuses primarily on land dispossession and challenges to resettlement. Conflicts over land intensified in the early 1990s, coinciding with the early stages of resettlement in southern Teso after a period of regional civil war and large-scale cattle rustling. In contrast to the large-scale "land grabs" in Sub-Saharan African that have occurred since the 2007-08 global commodities crisis, land expropriations occur mainly on a small-scale in Teso. I argue that there are a number of drivers to land dispossession in the …