Gender, Aesthetics, and Sexuality in Play: Uneasy Lessons from Girls’ Dolls, Action Figures, and Television Programs

How does children\u27s play with dolls and action figures engender exploration of gendered identities: from aesthetics and appearances, to social standards, and various rituals and performances? This paper examines recent research in art education and gender studies concerning dolls and figural toys marketed to girls. As an artist and teacher educator, I will draw upon my teaching experiences and examine artifacts of pedagogy from popular material culture. I will address issues of consumption while taking into consideration taboos of gender and sexuality within public and private play. While children\u27s toys as symbolic bodies may pose narrowly gendered and heteronormative models of adulthood, this article argues children may also begin to counter paradigms of gender and sexuality within unintended, subversive play at home and school. I will also propose coalitions of art and material culture, through which teachers can facilitate inquiries and projects around thoughtful juxtapositions of play, performance, and art-making

Feminist Zines: (Pre)Occupations of Gender, Politics, and D.I.Y. in a Digital Age

This article examines the potential of recent feminist zines as frameworks of grassroots D.I.Y. and direct democracy in physical and digital communities. While the height of zine creations as works on paper may be traced to the 1990s, this form of feminist counterculture has evolved and persisted in cyberspace, predating, accompanying, and arguably outlasting the physical reality of protests, revolutions, and political expressions such as the Occupy Movement(s). Contemporary zines contain not only email addresses alongside ‘snail mail’ addresses, but also links to digital sites accompanying real-world resources. Zinesters today utilize the handmade craftsmanship and hand drawn and written techniques of zines in combination with the grassroots connectivity enabled by digital networks relating to zines. These physical and digital communities form interesting protest spaces. This paper explores the persistence and potential of zines as various expressions of personal and political feminist identities via maker culture and of explorations of the dimensionality of the screen and the page. The educational contexts considered in this paper include university zine collections, zine-making in K-12 teaching, as well as zine communities outside of schools and academia

Systemic similarity analysis of compatibility drug-induced multiple pathway patterns _in vivo_

A major challenge in post-genomic research is to understand how physiological and pathological phenotypes arise from the networks of expressed genes and to develop powerful tools for translating the information exchanged between gene and the organ system networks. Although different expression modules may contribute independently to different phenotypes, it is difficult to interpret microarray experimental results at the level of single gene associations. The global effects and response pathways of small molecules in cells have been investigated, but the quantitative details of the activation mechanisms of multiple pathways _in vivo_ are not well understood. Similar response networks indicate similar modes of action, and gene networks may appear to be similar despite differences in the behaviour of individual gene groups. Here we establish the method for assessing global effect spectra of the complex signaling forms using Global Similarity Index (GSI) in cosines vector included angle. Our approach provides quantitative multidimensional measures of genes expression profile based on drug-dependent phenotypic alteration _in vivo_. These results make a starting point for identifying relationships between GSI at the molecular level and a step toward phenotypic outcomes at a system level to predict action of unknown compounds and any combination therapy

Graph-Based Decoding Model for Functional Alignment of Unaligned fMRI Data

Aggregating multi-subject functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data is indispensable for generating valid and general inferences from patterns distributed across human brains. The disparities in anatomical structures and functional topographies of human brains warrant aligning fMRI data across subjects. However, the existing functional alignment methods cannot handle well various kinds of fMRI datasets today, especially when they are not temporally-aligned, i.e., some of the subjects probably lack the responses to some stimuli, or different subjects might follow different sequences of stimuli. In this paper, a cross-subject graph that depicts the (dis)similarities between samples across subjects is used as a priori for developing a more flexible framework that suits an assortment of fMRI datasets. However, the high dimension of fMRI data and the use of multiple subjects makes the crude framework time-consuming or unpractical. To address this issue, we further regularize the framework, so that a novel feasible kernel-based optimization, which permits nonlinear feature extraction, could be theoretically developed. Specifically, a low-dimension assumption is imposed on each new feature space to avoid overfitting caused by the highspatial-low-temporal resolution of fMRI data. Experimental results on five datasets suggest that the proposed method is not only superior to several state-of-the-art methods on temporally-aligned fMRI data, but also suitable for dealing `with temporally-unaligned fMRI data.Comment: 17 pages, 10 figures, Proceedings of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-20

Highlighting User Related Advice

Research on explanation techniques for expert systems has demonstrated that (1) explanations are most effective when they address the user's needs and (2) it is necessary to augment explanations with information that is missing from the expert system‘s reasoning. It is our thesis that explanation content can also be improved by removing extraneous information from the system's reasoning and recognizing the remainder to emphasize user concerns. To test our ideas, we have developed an interactive natural language problem-solving system called ADVISOR which advises students on course selection. Previously, we have reported on our methodology for deriving user goals from the discourse, representing different points of view in the knowledge base and inferring user-oriented advice with a rule-based system that employs information from the appropriate perspective to address user goals. In this paper, we describe a model for pruning an explanation to highlight the role of the user's goal. The model is part of ADVISOR's natural language generation component. We demonstrate its efficacy with examples of different advice that ADVISOR provides for the same query in the context of different goals

Conduction of topologically-protected charged ferroelectric domain walls

We report on the observation of nanoscale conduction at ferroelectric domain walls in hexagonal HoMnO3 protected by the topology of multiferroic vortices using in situ conductive atomic force microscopy, piezoresponse force microscopy, and kelvin-probe force microscopy at low temperatures. In addition to previously observed Schottky-like rectification at low bias [Phys. Rev. Lett., 104, 217601 (2010)], conductance spectra reveal that negatively charged tail-to-tail walls exhibit enhanced conduction at high forward bias, while positively charged head-to-head walls exhibit suppressed conduction at high reverse bias. Our results pave the way for understanding the semiconducting properties of the domains and domain walls in small-gap ferroelectrics.Comment: 8 pages, 4 figure

Solution to the hole-doping problem and tunable quantum Hall effect in Bi2_{2}Se3_{3} thin films

Bi$_{2}$Se$_{3}$, one of the most widely studied topological insulators (TIs), is naturally electron-doped due to n-type native defects. However, many years of efforts to achieve p-type Bi$_{2}$Se$_{3}$ thin films have failed so far. Here, we provide a solution to this long-standing problem, showing that the main culprit has been the high density of interfacial defects. By suppressing these defects through an interfacial engineering scheme, we have successfully implemented p-type Bi$_{2}$Se$_{3}$ thin films down to the thinnest topological regime. On this platform, we present the first tunable quantum Hall effect (QHE) study in Bi$_{2}$Se$_{3}$ thin films, and reveal not only significantly asymmetric QHE signatures across the Dirac point but also the presence of competing anomalous states near the zeroth Landau level. The availability of doping tunable Bi$_{2}$Se$_{3}$ thin films will now make it possible to implement various topological quantum devices, previously inaccessible.Comment: 40 Pages, 8 Figures, 2 Tables, Accepted to Nano Letter