ScholarWorks@UMassAmherst

Recent Submissions

  • Publication
    Geoprivacy knowledge, attitudes, and behaviors in contemporary China
    (Taylor & Francis, 2024-11-14) Zhang, Hongyu; McKenzie, Grant
    China has an Internet penetration rate of over 70 percent and a massive user base of social media. However, the topic of privacy attitudes among Chinese individuals remains understudied. We analyzed geoprivacy concerns in China through an online survey and regression analysis. Our findings suggest a positive relation among privacy knowledge, attitude, and behavior, consistent with related literature. Declarative knowledge (such as privacy rights), on the other hand, was found to have a negative relation with privacy concerns, which has not been reported previously. In terms of demographic moderators, females had less privacy knowledge but more privacy protection behaviors, while the impact of age on privacy concerns was inconclusive. A notable discovery was the regional difference in privacy concerns within China, suggesting the potential geopolitical influence on individuals’ values and beliefs. Combined with the uncovering of behavioral change in response to involuntary location disclosure, the results of this article challenge the conventional notion that Chinese individuals are indifferent to their online privacy, thus reintroducing an underexplored perspective from the Global South into geoprivacy studies.
  • Publication
    Do Dibosons Dream of Semileptonic Sheep? Searching for Heavy WH Resonances and Optimizing Track Reconstruction with the Atlas Detector
    (2024-09) Vessella, Makayla
    A search for new heavy vector resonances decaying into a $W$ boson and a Standard-Model Higgs boson ($h$), targeting a semileptonic final state where the $W$ boson decays into a lepton-neutrino pair and the Higgs boson decays into a b-quark pair, is performed using 139 fb\textsuperscript{-1} of $\sqrt{s}$ = 13 TeV proton-proton collision data collected by the ATLAS detector at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) during LHC Run 2 (2015-2018). The search probes a wide range of potential heavy resonance masses, from 400 GeV to 5 TeV, by examining the invariant and transverse mass distributions of $Wh$ candidates for a localized excess. Many beyond Standard Model (BSM) theories generically predict such diboson vector resonances, such as the Heavy Vector Triplet (HVT) benchmark model through which the results are interpreted. No significant excess over Standard Model predictions is observed, and 95\% confidence level upper limits are placed on the production cross-section times branching ratio. These limits are also converted into constraints on the parameter space of the HVT model. Furthermore, reconstructing the trajectories of charged particles through the ATLAS Inner Detector is a critical component of both this search and the broader ATLAS physics program, but represents an enormous computational challenge due to its inherent combinatorial complexity. This work also presents successful efforts to improve and optimize this process, in both computational resources and physics performance, for LHC Run 3 (2022-2025). Under design accelerator conditions, the improved ATLAS track reconstruction is twice as fast as the legacy version, with no significant reduction in overall efficiency and a more than two-fold reduction in ``fake" tracks.
  • Publication
    Promoting Future Teachers' Critical Consciousness: How Do We Teach Critical Media Literacy?
    (2024-09) Söken, Ali
    The pervasive use of media and technology among U.S. youth, coupled with a shifting demographic around race, gender, and social class, contrasts sharply with the predominantly white, female teaching force. As media literacy becomes increasingly crucial, the current focus remains limited in scope, and follow a color-blind ideology. There is an urgent need for teacher education programs to integrate critical media literacy (CML) to equip future educators with the tools to guide students in critically analyzing media messages and expressing their own narratives. This study investigates how future teachers engage with CML and explores methods to enhance its instruction. Utilizing the "Education and Film" course as a research site, data were collected from 11 future educators through surveys and written artifacts. Grounded in a practitioner inquiry approach, the study identifies two primary avenues of learning: a) critical self-reflection on media socialization: future teachers engage in self-reflection, recognizing their privileges, unlearning negative societal messages, and cultivating a positive identity. b) unlearning dominant narratives: They actively deconstruct pervasive narratives, including gendered scripts, white saviorism, and the myth of meritocracy. Furthermore, the study emphasizes the importance of teaching practices that foster a community of trust and emphasize the humanity of both educators and students. These findings contribute to the field by highlighting effective strategies for CML instruction, with implications for the development of teacher education curricula that are responsive to the needs of a diverse student population. This study can contribute to the ongoing social justice efforts, anti-racist pedagogy, and media literacy education in teacher education programs, and in different fields that will support marginalized identities while it also educates the teachers from dominant groups.
  • Publication
    Mereology, Ideology, and Formal Ontology
    (2024-09) Schechter, Samuel
    We often say that things are parts of others things. My hand is a part of me. New York State is a part of the U.S. The goalie is a part of the team. The letter 'a' is a part of the word 'and'. We also say that some objects are composed of others. My body is composed of my foot, my mouth, and so on; the U.S. is composed of 50 states and some territories. The team is composed of players, coaches, and staff. The word 'and' is composed of three letters: 'a', 'n' and 'd'. The study of relations like parthood and composition is known as mereology. The central task of mereology is to understand when and how objects are built from other objects. Agreement in mereology, however, does not seem forthcoming. And this isn't just your run-of-the-mill philosophical stubbornness. Case in point: some mereologists think of parthood as a logical notion akin to conjunction; others as a physical notion akin to having mass. Moreover, the former often accuse the latter of being conceptually confused: one mereologist's conceptual truth turns out to be another's contingent falsehood. Thus, mereological disputes have become the poster child for metaphysical anti-realism. Anti-realism or not, though, it is hard to shake the feeling that there is something fundamentally misguided about mereological inquiry. Accordingly, this dissertation engages in what may as well be called metamereology. It aims to answer questions like: what are we doing when we do mereology? How can we make progress on notoriously stubborn mereological disputes? What, if anything, turns on the resolution of such disputes? The first half constitutes the negative thrust of the project. There, I aim to identify and overcome obstacles to productive mereological discussion. In doing so, I hope to clarify exactly what is at stake in traditional mereological debates. The second half constitutes the positive thrust. In particular, I offer a proof-of-concept of how I believe mereological inquiry should proceed. The approach I suggest is a fairly holistic one that places the theoretical work that mereology can do in our best theories front and center. In particular, chapters five and six explore the role of mereology from the perspective of a generally Humean approach to metaphysics.
  • Publication
    Investigating the Role of Predictive Representations in Implicit Event Boundaries, Statistical Learning, and Categorization
    (2024-09) Savalia, Tejas
    We make sense of the world by extracting meaningful information from a continuous sensory stream. Extracting meaningful information involves first segmenting this continuous sensory stream into shorter, processable chunks. These discrete chunks of events represent our recalled experiences and allow us to develop heuristics representing the statistical regularities in our environment. In this dissertation, I present a predictive context representational account of segmenting the continuous sensory stream into smaller chunks. I demonstrate that maintaining a distributed context representation defined by an expectation of upcoming future events and learned through temporal difference learning naturally leads to the separation of temporally disjoint events without perceptually explicit markers. I contrast this predictive, error-driven account of context representation with an associative learning account and provide behavioral evidence in support of the predictive representational account. I then show that such predictive context representations can be used as a common framework to understand higher order cognitive processes of event cognition and categorization. I first assess whether implicitly operationalized event boundaries, where changes in ongoing context that mark boundaries are not perceptually salient, provide the same behavioral properties as explicitly operationalized event boundaries thereby providing evidence for shared representations between the two. Finally, I apply the representational framework to understand the cognitive processes behind implicit category learning. I show that predictive representations can arbitrate category learning via the shared temporal context for items in each category. Work in this dissertation provides a mechanistic account for statistical learning through widely applicable framework of temporal difference learning. I further demonstrate a use of predictive representations as a common framework to understand higher-order cognitive processes such as event cognition, and categorization.