It is common to test many hypotheses simultaneously in the application of statistics. The probability of making a false discovery grows with the number of statistical tests performed. When all the null hypotheses are true, and the test statistics are indepen- dent and continuous, the error rates from the family wise error rate (FWER)- and the false discovery rate (FDR)-controlling procedures are equal to the nominal level. When some of the null hypotheses are not true, both procedures are conservative. In the first part of this study, we review the background of the problem and propose methods to estimate the number of true null hypotheses. The estimates can be used in FWER- and FDR-controlling procedures with a consequent increase in power. We conduct simulation studies and apply the estimation methods to data sets with bio- logical or clinical significance. In the second part of the study, we propose a mixture model approach for the analysis of ChIP-chip high density oligonucleotide array data to study the interac- tions between proteins and DNA. If we could identify the specific locations where proteins interact with DNA, we could increase our understanding of many important cellular events. Most experiments to date are performed in culture on cell lines, bac- teria, or yeast, and future experiments will include those in developing tissues, organs, or cancer biopsies, and they are critical in understanding the function of genes and proteins. Here we investigate the ChIP-chip data structure and use a beta-mixture model to help identify the binding sites. To determine the appropriate number of components in the mixture model, we suggest the Anderson-Darling testing. Our study indicates that it is a reasonable means of choosing the number of components in a beta-mixture model. The mixture model procedure has broad applications in biology and is illustrated with several data sets from bioinformatics experiments.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, San Diego, and San Diego State University, 2003. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 98-102).

In the current study, children’s understanding of false belief, intention, and their ability to distinguish the appearance of a character from its reality was investigated. Seventy-two three to five years olds were recruited from several preschools in the Silicon Valley in California. During the experiment, children were shown an animated movie in a computer and asked the false belief, intention, and appearance-reality distinction questions. Following the animated movie, children were also asked if they understand 10 mental words that depicted the human mind, such as think, want, believe, etc. The relationship between the children’s knowledge of the human mind and the mental words they understood was explored. Results of the current study revealed that children who were four and half to five performed better than children three and half to four on false belief tasks. Children’s performance on intention and appearance-reality distinction questions did not differ significantly across age. However, girls’ performance was superior to boys’ performance on intention questions. Similarly, girls’ knowledge of overall naïve psychology was also superior to that of boys. Moreover, the order of the naïve psychology concepts that children passed in current study was from intention to appearance-reality distinction and then false belief. Finally, the regression analysis of the data revealed that the mental word vocabulary children processed was closely related to naïve psychology development. More specifically, the number of total mental words that were reported by children or assessed by contextual questions was a significant predictor of naïve psychology knowledge.

In this research, I describe the use of false rings to reconstruct local histories of seasonal drought in riparian ecosystems in semiarid regions. In tree-ring analysis, false rings are boundary-like features often formed as a response to drought within the growing season. Drought can be a common feature in hydrologic regimes of dryland rivers but in recent decades drought has been intensifying due to climate change and increasing water use by cities, agriculture and industry. Identifying when and where water availability has decreased along the river course is critical for understanding, and therefore managing, these generally endangered ecosystems. The higher density of trees compared to instrumental data make them ideal candidates for reconstructing site-specific drought patterns.The first part of this dissertation is an observational study conducted on the San Pedro River in southeastern Arizona during 2002. I used dendrometer data and local hydrological data to show that a period of negligible radial growth in cottonwood during the middle of the growing season coincided with a channel drying event. Tree-ring core samples confirmed that false-rings had formed in each of the instrumented trees. The second part of this dissertation is an experimental study designed to evaluate the effect of different levels of water stress on false-ring formation in cottonwood and willow. I showed that experimental decreases in water availability for periods as short as ten days were enough to induce false-ring formation in willow. Longer periods of reduced water availability were generally required to induce false-ring formation in cottonwood. In the final part of this dissertation, I reconstructed false-ring occurrence in Fremont cottonwoods at three sites along the San Pedro River. I infer from false-ring frequencies that the severity of summer drought has been increasing over the last four to six decades but that the drought severity varies along a hydrological gradient. Overall, the findings in this body of research confirm that false rings in riparian tree species can be used as indicators of seasonal drought and underscore the importance of identifying site-specific responses to reduced water availability along the riparian corridor.

Studien beskriver aktuell forskning kring hur yngre barn tänker om andra människors tankar och känslor utifrån olika teoretiska perspektiv. Vidare provas ett test som så tidigt som möjligt under barns utveckling möjligen kan belysa förskolebarns förmåga att sätta sig in i någon annans tankar, perspektiv. Inom autismforskningen har begreppet theory of mind använts för att belysa den kognitiva förmåga som krävs för att en person ska kunna sätta sig in i någon annans tankar. Från flera håll har begreppet ifrågasatts eftersom det krävs flera kognitiva komponenter såsom minne och verbal förmåga för att lösa denna typ av uppgifter. Följande studie har genomförts för att undersöka ett test som så renodlat som möjligt försöker belysa förmågan att förstå hur någon annan tänker. Elva barn som utretts för autismspektrumfrågeställning och fått diagnosen autism har fått genomföra testet ”Kicki och Katten” och jämförts med tio typiskt utvecklade barn matchade på mental ålder. Resultatet visar att det inte finns någon skillnad mellan barnen med autism och de typiskt utvecklade barnen och att barn med en mental ålder under fyra år, i båda grupperna, inte klarar av testet Kicki och Katten. Testet Kicki och Katten fungerar inte för att bedöma theory of mind hos yngre barn än fyra år.

The project began with a comprehensive investigation to discover and define the crucial elements of design in high density housing that foster a strong and rich sense of community. Both historical precedents and current Vancouver projects were studied to determine their attitude toward community in dense housing situations. I found the designs that were most successful in preserving a traditional sense of community demonstrated a far greater respect for one's individuality. They provided a strong frame for variable urban living, which reflects the pluralism of urban life. The program for this thesis was a live/work community and one live/work building within that planned community. The site for this exploration was South-East False Creek. The resolution of my proposal began with developing a new housing fabric, a prototype that could be used at South-East False Creek or in other areas of the city. The fabric I developed is a more intimate, finer slice of the existing Vancouver city grid. By maintaining some of the critical dimensions of Vancouver's city grid, the design of the new fabric can either fit into the existing grid or occur next to it. The community plan provides several distinct adjacencies for the buildings: live side, work side, park side and street/parking side. My concern with the design of the building was to identify a set of possibilities that are inherent in the community fabric, which show the diversity of the building itself as well as the flexibility of the space within the units.

[No Abstract]

The false/ recovered memory debate has highlighted the complexities involved in assessing the validity of memories for emotional childhood events. This dissertation begins by tracing the history of the dominant school of thought on memory, the spatial perspective, as well as far less conspicuous reconstructive views, and challenges influential modern spatial views (e.g., repression) in light of a more defensible reconstructive model. The empirical component of this dissertation was designed to compare the nature of real, created, and fabricated childhood memories for emotional events within individuals. The critical issues being addressed in the experiment were: (1) whether people could come to remember false ("created") memories for emotional events; (2) if so, whether differences existed between created memories and real and/or intentionally lied about (fabricated) memories, and; (3) whether there were individual differences in susceptibility to created memories. Using a variation of an approach developed by Hyman, Husband, and Billings (1995), a questionnaire was forwarded to participants' parents inquiring about six categories of negative emotional events (serious medical procedure, serious animal attack, getting seriously hurt by another child, serious indoor accident, serious outdoor accident, and getting lost) which the participant may or may not have experienced between the ages of 4 and 10 years. Parents were asked to describe each event which had occurred and to give a number of specific pieces of information relating to the event. Based on the questionnaire information (85% response rate), 77 participants were interviewed about each of a: (1) real event; (2) false event; and (3) fabricated event, in three weekly-spaced interviews. Over the three interviews, the interviewers attempted to implant a created memory for the false emotional event using encouragement, context reinstatement, guided imagery, and instructing daily recall attempts. In the first interview, participant were asked about the real event and the false event (counterbalanced), each introduced as a true event. They were provided the event tide and four specific pieces of information to cue their memories (their age, location, season/ month, and people present), based on questionnaire information (contrived for the false events). In the second interview, participants were re-interviewed about their memories for the false event followed by the implantation procedure. In the third interview, participants were again interviewed about the false event with the same interview approach. Finally (after the last attempt at recalling the false event), they were provided written instructions to fabricate a childhood memory, again with an event category and four information clues, given preparation rime and a monetary incentive, and interviewed about the fabricated event with the same format as the other two memory types. Following transcription of the two or three (if a created memory had emerged) final memory reports, the memories were compared on several dependent measures, collectively designated the Memory Assessment Procedure (MAP), relating to their subjective and presentation characteristics. Participants were then asked to complete a Dissociative Experiences Scale (DES) questionnaire to examine if susceptibility to created memories was related to a general dissociative cognitive pattern. Results indicated that twenty (26%) of participants created complete memories for the false emotional events (seven animal attacks, five instances of getting seriously hurt by another child, four serious outdoor accidents, three episodes of getting lost, and one medical procedure). Furthermore, 29.9% of participants reported some false information pertaining to the false event ("partial" memories), for a total of 55.9% of participants recalling information relating to the false event. The remaining participants (44.2%) reported no information pertaining to the false event. There were several interesting differences among the three memory types, including stress ratings, vividness/ clarity ratings, confidence ratings, coherence, number of details, repeated details, and memory failures. For example, when relating a created memory, participants were less confident and the memories were less vivid and detailed compared to the other memory types, but similar in sensory components and relevancy. On the other hand, participants were highly confident in their fabricated memories which were rated as highly stressful and vivid, and the memories were detailed. However, when relating a fabricated memory, participants repeated details and were less willing to admit lacking memory, relative to real memories. Other findings are reported on the origin of the created memories, age factors, memory perspective, reasons provided for first forgetting the false event, and post-interview confidence in the created memories. On the DES , participants who had come up with a partial or a created memory scored, on average, about twice as high as those participants who had recalled no false information, indicating that susceptibility to memory distortion may be related to a general dissociative pattern. This was the largest scale created memory study to date and the first to look at a variety of emotional childhood events and the content of the memories. Implications of the findings for the false memory debate and memory assessment in forensic contexts are discussed.

We examined the spatiotemporal dynamics underlying the processing of a false belief task using magnetoencephalography (MEG). Twenty adults performed a false belief task adapted for MEG. Regions of interest were selected based on source analyses on the contrast between false and true belief, and MEG source time-course reconstructions were generated and analyzed to determine the temporal architecture of neural activations specific to false belief reasoning. We found frontal, temporal and parietal regions to activate during false belief processing, confirming prior findings. We also extend previous findings by adding information about the temporal profile of neural activity during theory of mind processing, an area lacking in the literature. We found that increased frontal activity began at 100 ms bilaterally, followed by parietal regions from 200 to 330 ms and temporal regions at 350 ms, at which point frontal activity became lateralized to the right hemisphere.

No description available.