Graduate and Undergraduate Student Research

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A Computational Model of Routine Procedural Memory
(Rice University, 2009) Tamborello, Franklin Patrick, II; Byrne, Michael D.
Cooper and Shallice (2000) implemented a computational version of the Norman and Shallice’s (1986) Contention Scheduling Model (CSM). The CSM is a hierarchically organized network of action schemas and goals. Botvinick and Plaut (2004) instead took a connectionist approach to modeling routine procedural behavior. They argued in favor of holistic, distributed representation of learned step co-occurrence associations. Two experiments found that people can adapt routine procedural behavior to changing circumstances quite readily and that other factors besides statistical co-occurrence can have influence on action selection. A CSM-inspired ACT-R model of the two experiments is the first to postdict differential error rates across multiple between-subjects conditions and trial types. Results from the behavioral and modeling studies favor a CSM-like theory of human routine procedural memory that uses discrete, hierarchically-organized goal and action representations that are adaptable to new but similar procedures.
A Crisis of People or Politics? : Revisiting the Impact of Narrative Framing of Immigration in German Newspapers in 2018
(Rice University, 2019-05) Schumacher, Erika; Hamm, Keith
In 2017, a report (Georgiou & Zaborowski) traced the media portrayal of the 2015 refugee crisis and of immigrants in European countries. The authors reported a general negative portrayal of immigrants in the news. Additionally, they showed a shift: the refugee crisis was initially described as a humanitarian issue that transcended boundaries; by the end of 2015, each country viewed migrants as an issue of national security. My research revisits the media narrative around the migrant crisis in 2018, specifically in Germany, which accepted an exceptionally large number of refugees. My research categorizes newspaper articles written on the topic of immigration over the course of 2018, finding that the issue of immigration has shifted narratives once again. While not necessarily making value statements on immigrants themselves, German print media presents positive images of immigrants in an economic context and negative images of immigrants in a societal context. Further, immigration is overwhelmingly an issue of politics and policy. In this way, the print media talks around immigrants, showing them as an issue of electoral politics instead of societal participants.
A Cry for the Lost: A Transitioning Native Worldview in Colonial California
(Rice University, 2017) Sanchez, Kivani Ailene
Historically, people have used legends across cultures as a means of transmitting moral values and socializing the young while providing a source of entertainment and education to their listeners. Contemporary versions of legends have the ability to provide insight to the underlying worldviews, which are shaped by the cultural context within a particular timeframe of history, that inspire revisions of a particular legend. In this essay, I use the methodology presented in Domino Perez’s There was a Woman: La Llorona from Folklore to Popular Culture (2008) to examine a story told by one of the characters in Jorge’s Ainslie’s novel, “Los Pochos” (1934), as a revision of the legend La Llorona that serves as a non-traditional historical narrative of the effects of Westernization on the native population within the missions of Alta-California. I argue that the areas of revision within the telling demonstrate a transitioning worldview of the villagers of San Fernando del Rey that is shaped by the cultural, societal, and historical contexts of Spanish Colonialism within mission communities of Alta-California.
A Dying Dream
(Rice University, 2017) McDowell, Michael Thomas
This paper examines educational segregation and inequity in our country today. By researching the history of educational segregation in the United States, it becomes clear that since 1988 schools have resegregated, undoing most of the progress they made in the ‘60s and ‘70s. This has caused the achievement gap between minority and white students to increase dramatically, with minorities in apartheid schools (where 1% of the students are white) receiving a drastically inferior education to their white counterparts. This is largely due to the lack of human, physical, and social capital present in families and schools of minorities. While this paper is primarily concerned with the existence of this problem, it will assert that school choice is the easiest and friendliest way to achieve racial balance and desegregation, although this paper will also claim that the Justice Department should bring lawsuits against extremely segregated urban districts that do not solve the problem themselves.
A Framework for Testing Concurrent Programs
(Rice University, 2011) Ricken, Mathias; Cartwright, Robert S.
This study proposes a new framework that can effectively apply unit testing to concurrent programs, which are difficult to develop and debug. Test-driven development, a practice enabling developers to detect bugs early by incorporating unit testing into the development process, has become wide-spread, but it has only been effective for programs with a single thread of control. The order of operations in different threads is essentially non-deterministic, making it more complicated to reason about program properties in concurrent programs than in single-threaded programs. Because hardware, operating systems, and compiler optimizations influence the order in which operations in different threads are executed, debugging is problematic since a problem often cannot be reproduced on other machines. Multicore processors, which have replaced older single-core designs, have exacerbated these problems because they demand the use of concurrency if programs are to benefit from new processors. The existing tools for unit testing programs are either flawed or too costly. JUnit, for instance, assumes that programs are single-threaded and therefore does not work for concurrent programs; ConTest and rstest predate the revised Java memory model and make incorrect assumptions about the operations that affect synchronization. Approaches such as model checking or comprehensive schedule- based execution are too costly to be used frequently. All of these problems prevent software developers from adopting the current tools on a large scale. The proposed framework (i) improves JUnit to recognize errors in all threads, a necessary development without which all other improvements are futile, (ii) places some restrictions on the programs to facilitate automatic testing, (iii) provides tools that reduce programmer mistakes, and (iv) re-runs the unit tests with randomized schedules to simulate the execution under different conditions and on different ma- chines, increasing the probability that errors are detected. The improvements and restrictions, shown not to seriously impede programmers, reliably detect problems that the original JUnit missed. The execution with randomized schedules reveals problems that rarely occur under normal conditions. With an effective testing tool for concurrent programs, developers can test pro- grams more reliably and decrease the number of errors in spite of the proliferation of concurrency demanded by modern processors.
A Phenomenological Critique of Irene McMullin's Formulation of Heideggerian Temporality
(Rice University, 2019) Barton, Jason; Crowell, Steven
This paper aims at differentiating Martin Heidegger’s phenomenological ontology from Emmanuel Levinas’s phenomenological ethics on the experiential level of encountering otherness. In addition to drawing from each author’s seminal texts, I will contextualize the disagreement between Heidegger and Levinas to Irene McMullin’s Time and the Shared World: Heidegger on Social Relations. McMullin, in her response to Jean-Paul Sartre’s criticism of Heidegger’s ontology, provides a formulation of Heideggerian temporality that markedly deviates from Heideggerian ontological commitments in Being and Time. I present and develop two deviations: (a) McMullin positions Dasein’s original encounter with the Other before the establishment of Dasein’s ontological structures (i.e., Being-in-the-world and Being-with-others) and (b) McMullin attributes Dasein’s inauthenticity to the Other’s limitation of Dasein’s temporalization of Being. I contend that both deviations correspond with Levinas’s phenomenology of temporality more than Heidegger’s phenomenology of temporality. It is through McMullin’s deviations, therefore, that distinctions can be drawn between Heidegger’s ontological articulation of Being-guilty, the call of conscience, Being-towards-death, and Angst on one hand and Levinas’s metaphysical articulation of conscience, shame, and death on the other.
Acknowledging Impostor Phenomenon: How Does It Affect and Individual's Likability?
(Rice University, 2019) Lee, Jennifer
The impostor phenomenon (IP) is the feeling of being an intellectual fraud regardless of any external evidence of incompetency. Research on the effects of IP on mental health is important in understanding how to nurture positive experiences through the duration of undergraduate life. However, the social interactions of individuals who experience IP are not well understood. We surveyed Rice undergraduates to understand how the disclosure of feelings of impostor might affect how an participant might perceive the individual.We analyzed how a hypothetical individual’s disclosure (N=148) or non-disclosure (N=144) of feelings of IP and participant’s own feelings of IP affect how participants rate the individual in likeability. Results indicated no strong effect of participant’s own IP on the likeability rating of the hypothetical individual. However, additional findings suggest that many Rice students experience some level of IP. These findings suggest that IP is an issue that deserves attention on how it affects the undergraduate life and research on methods for reducing the level of IP that students experience
Action of the Mazur pattern up to topological concordance
(arXiv, 2024) Manchester, Alex
In the '80s, Freedman showed that the Whitehead doubling operator acts trivally up to topological concordance. On the other hand, Akbulut showed that the Whitehead doubling operator acts nontrivially up to smooth concordance. The Mazur pattern is a natural candidate for a satellite operator which acts by the identity up to topological concordance but not up to smooth concordance. Recently there has been a resurgence of study of the action of the Mazur pattern up to concordance in the smooth and topological categories. Examples showing that the Mazur pattern does not act by the identity up to smooth concordance have been given by Cochran--Franklin--Hedden--Horn and Collins. In this paper, we give evidence that the Mazur pattern acts by the identity up to topological concordance. In particular, we show that two satellite operators $P_{K_0,\eta_0}$ and $P_{K_1,\eta_1}$ with $\eta_0$ and $\eta_1$ freely homotopic have the same action on the topological concordance group modulo the subgroup of $(1)$-solvable knots, which gives evidence that they act in the same way up to topological concordance. In particular, the Mazur pattern and the identity operator are related in this way, and so this is evidence for the topological side of the analogy to the Whitehead doubling operator. We give additional evidence that they have the same action on the full topological concordance group by showing that up to topological concordance they cannot be distinguished by Casson-Gordon invariants or metabelian $\rho$-invariants.
Adaptation of the Samson Narrative in The Simpsons
(Rice University, 2018) Ochoa, Lidia
Samson, the Nazarite Judge of the Judahites, is a character who has been widely discussed among biblical scholars. Scholars’ conclusions range from Samson as a hero, to Samson as a moral lesson, from Samson as a tragic character, to Samson as a literary device. There is no one view of Samson that is overwhelmingly more popular among scholars. However, scholars are not the only ones who have taken it upon themselves to interpret and bring forth a message or meaning from the Samson narrative. The creators of The Simpsons have also taken their own spin on the story in an episode cleverly titled “Simpson and Delilah.” In this paper I analyze the use of the biblical story of Samson in The Simpsons and ultimately compare the message conveyed in the episode to those found in the biblical story by scholars. The
Affection: Essays on Affect, Empathy, and the Politics of Feeling
(Rice University, 2021-05) Li-Wang, Jennifer; Comer, Krista
Often, we view feelings as squishy—personal and subjective, therefore private and apolitical. Even within ourselves, our feelings can often seem reflexive and out of our own control. This thesis represents my attempt to hold these squishy feelings and look at them up close, from different angles. In doing so, I hope to see how our affects may not only be personal to ourselves, but also highly communal, performative, and regulated by and within communities. Affects—our feelings, emotions, and moods—are a matter of political and intellectual concern. Different political aims often mobilize our affects and manipulate them to conform to certain desirable shapes. Thus, paying attention to affects—the ways they are evoked, politicized, and ascribed (un)desirability—may help us stay close to our own needs and the needs of our community.
African Americans in Tom’s Town: Black Kansas City Negotiates the Pendergast Machine
(Rice University, 2017) Vigran, Sydney
After the Addendum: Author Rights Management and/as Library Service
(Rice University, 2017-02) LaFlamme, Marcel; Fondren Library
This report presents the findings from a qualitative study of Rice University faculty attitudes and practices around author rights conducted by Marcel LaFlamme, a graduate student in the Department of Anthropology, during his tenure as a Fondren Fellow. This project was supervised by Shannon Kipphut-Smith, Fondren Library’s scholarly communications liaison.
Allegory for Political Rehabilitation: William and Mary, 1692, and Henry Purcell’s The Fairy Queen
(Rice University, 2014) Krawetz, Alexandra
When King William III and Queen Mary II ascended to the English throne in 1689 they were relatively well received. However, by 1692 their relationship with the public was strained. This created a need for image rehabilitation that could be partially satisfied by a public work, such as semi-opera. The Fairy Queen, Henry Purcell’s 1692 semi-opera, can be interpreted as a vehicle for this rehabilitation. Rehabilitation is achieved in this work through literary and historical allusions as well as an allegorical relationship between The Fairy Queen’s Queen Titania and England’s Queen Mary. Purcell subtlety reinforces these references and this relationship through instrumental, harmonic, and dramatic choices.
Amplified Encounters at High Speed
(Rice University, 2011) Sibley, Rebecca; Pope, Albert
This thesis expands upon the dialogue between speed and architecture, investigating how architecture reinterprets the linear city, originally defined by the continuous fabric of the freeway and more recently reconfigured by the high speed rail line. Using the linear city as a site of exploration and high speed rail as a ground to test new typologies of architectural insertions at amplified speed, this thesis produces an extended civic space along the proposed high speed rail line connecting Tampa and Orlando. Combining a series of performance and commercial programs, this new typology will make the obscured visual experience along the extended territory of the rail line legible, through a sequencing of specific architectural intersections, exploring how monumental civic space will be made and occupied in the sprawl of the American city.
An Analysis of the Evolution of White House Bioscience and Health Policy Through PCAST Reports
(Rice University, 2023) Somani, Soumya
The researcher aimed to determine the role of independent scientific advisors in informing federal policy related to health and biosciences across presidential administrations from 1992-2020. Each president appoints a group of preeminent scientists, engineers, and industry leaders to the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST), a science advisory committee created in 1990 by President George H.W. Bush. PCAST advises the president on federal policy related to science and technology through public reports and committee meetings. This study presents a thematic analysis of 15 PCAST reports centered on bioscience or health policy to understand how White House policy on a range of biomedical research areas changed with time. Specific themes identified in each report included the types of research emphasized (basic, applied/translational, and/or direct clinical care); the audiences engaged in policy recommendations (academia, industry, and/or government); the structure and rhetoric employed; language addressing political goals and existing policies and laws; prioritization of public health; and types of action items proposed by PCAST. This analysis revealed a shift over the past thirty years from a predominant focus on basic research to an emphasis on accelerated, translational research. The intended audience also gradually expanded from the government to include stakeholders in industry and academia. Even within governmental audiences, the range of agencies and departments engaged in the reports progressively widened. The increasing prioritization of public health topics and references to politics or law—particularly ethics, privacy, and regulation—was also observed. Policy action items were similar across reports, often referencing public-private investment, curricular reform, and the establishment of new committees. Report structure varied with each PCAST, but the justification for policy recommendations consistently relied on ideas of economic security and growth. The increasing diversity of audiences and research and development (R&D) priorities along with the intertwining of public health and politics indicate that federal bioscience policy has become more complex over time, but the rhetoric surrounding policy recommendations remained relatively constant. A growing overreliance on technological policy solutions and a notable dearth of focus on health disparities/equity and civic engagement across the rep orts indicate that PCAST could potentially broaden its approach to health and bioscience policy to address emerging concerns.
Application of a fully polynomial randomized approximation scheme (FPRAS) to infrastructure system reliability assessments
(8/6/2017) Fu, Bowen; Dueñas-Osorio, Leonardo
Networked systems make the reliability assessment of critical infrastructure computationally challenging given the combinatorial nature of system-level states. Several methods from numerical schemes to analytical approaches, such as Monte Carlo Simulation (MCS) and recursive decomposition algorithms (RDA), respectively, have been applied to this stochastic network problem. Despite progress over several decades, the problem remains open because of its intrinsic computational complexity. As the structural facilities of infrastructure systems continue to in terconnect in network forms, their study steers analysts to develop system reliability assessment methods based on graph theory and network science. A fully polynomial randomized approximation scheme (FPRAS) based on Karger’s graph contraction algorithm is an approximating method for reliability evaluation, which has a unique property rarely exploited in engineering reliability: that by performing a number of experiments in polynomial time (as a function of system size), it provides an a priori theoretical guarantee that the reliability estimate falls into the ϵ-neighborhood of its true value with (1−δ) confidence. We build upon the FPRAS ideas to develop an s-t reliability version that has practical appeal. Focusing on the relevant-cut enumeration stage of the FPRAS, we find correlations between the recurrence frequencies of links in minimum cuts within the randomization phase of the contraction algorithm, and typical network topological properties. We employ LASSO regression analysis to approximate the relationship between link recurrence frequencies and such topological metrics. With the topology-informed link recurrence frequencies, obtained at a much lower computational cost, we use a new biased contraction probability yielding 16.9% more distinct minimum cuts (MinCuts) than the original random contraction scheme. The biased contraction scheme proposed here can significantly improve the efficiency of reliability evaluation of networked infrastructure systems, while supporting infrastructure systems design, maintenance and restoration given its ability to offer error guarantees, which are ideal for future prescriptive guidelines in practice.
Architecture in the Marketplace of Ideas: Copyright and its "Chilling" Effects
(Rice University, 2009) Tankard, Jessica
This paper questions the applicability of current legal standards of copyright to architectural works. Copyright law, as currently written, does not address the unique needs and design practices common to the field of architecture. For example, in architecture, the appropriation of existing design strategies in new built works is common, and should not be seen as a copyright infringement. Secondly, architectural works integrate aesthetics and utility in ways that are often difficult to separate, therein complicating the legal distinction between patents (intended for utilitarian objects) and copyrights (intended for artistic productions). Furthermore, architectural works are not usually meant to be mass-produced and are difficult to copy, thus bringing into question the need to regulate their reproduction. The desire to create connections with the surrounding context of a built work is a fourth argument against the copyrighting of architectural works. This paper problematizes architecture’s position as a copyright protected field, synthesizing information from intellectual property law, cultural theory, economics, and architecture, using the works of prolific architect Rem Koolhaas as key examples. Copyleft thought and antirivalry policies are defined and proposed as alternative solutions to copyright law in the domain of architecture.
Archival (Yellow) Fever: The Letters of Kezia Payne DePelchin and E. Kate Heckle
(Rice University, 2011) O'Leary, Joanna Shawn Brigid
I originally submitted “Archival (Yellow) Fever” as my final paper for Dr. Helena Michie’s graduate seminar on Victorian fiction and historicism. This paper includes my analysis of the DePelchin/Heckle materials, a collection of writings by two female nurses serving in the 1878 Mississippi Valley Yellow Fever Epidemic; a meta-reflection on my experience in the archive; and proposals for two future research projects based my preliminary research. My first project, “Narrativizing Disease,” explores how DePelchin in particular sought to establish herself as an authorial figure via elaborate literary motifs and highly stylized language. This project also investigates the possibility that both women used war metaphors in their descriptions as a means of positing the Epidemic as a new sort of battle that specifically required female “soldiers” (i.e., caregivers). “The Legacy of Infection,” the second project, in turn examines how yellow fever may have permanently “infected” a household, that is to say, changed its gender and economic hierarchies, altered power dynamics, and/or transformed the space of the home. Because DePelchin and Heckle provided detailed accounts as to how patients and families operated during the Epidemic, the task of this second project is to extend and/or resolve those narratives begun by DePelchin and Heckle by engaging in a scholarly scavenger hunt of sorts through various historical sites and archives throughout the country.
Autocorrelation Reflectivity of Mars
(Wiley, 2020) Deng, Sizhuang; Levander, Alan
The seismic structure of the Martian interior can shed light on the formation and dynamic evolution of the planet and our solar system. The deployment of the seismograph carried by the InSight mission provides a means to study Martian internal structure. We used ambient noise autocorrelation to analyze the available vertical component seismic data to recover the reflectivity beneath the Insight lander. We identify the noise that is approximately periodic with the Martian sol as daily lander operations and the diurnal variation in Martian weather and tides. To investigate the seismic discontinuities at different depths, the autocorrelograms are filtered and stacked into different frequency bands. We observe prominent reflection signals probably corresponding to the Martian Moho, the olivine-wadsleyite transition in the mantle, and the core-mantle boundary in the stacked autocorrelograms. We estimate the depths of these boundaries as ~35, 1,110–1,170, and 1,520–1,600 km, consistent with other estimates.
Between Borders: a comparative study of traditional and fronterizo migrants
(Rice University, 2017) Rendon-Ramos, Erika
My research project seeks to break down gendered generalizations along the U.S. - Mexico borderland to demonstrate the diversity of the borderland experience based on one’s location and gender and furthermore, to show how women exhibit their agency in various facets of life regardless of the machismo culture. It furthers examinations of gendered migration by exploring its nuances at different points along the U.S. – Mexico border.

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