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As a woman whose career lifted off during the era of Abstract Expressionism, Elaine de Kooning is precariously positioned between her gender and her career. She began painting in the midst of a male-dominated movement and in later years continued to use very masculine themes in her art; however, her gender sets her apart from her mostly male colleagues during the Abstract Expressionist period. The mid-century expectation of machismo and masculinity shaped Elaine de Kooning’s art and career, and there is a tension within her art as she tried to fit the established (male) persona of the typical Abstract Expressionist artist while also maintaining a female identity. As the wife of Willem de Kooning, Elaine is most often discussed with respect to this relationship. Her name is infrequently mentioned in scholarship without reference to Willem, and her contribution to art history has only recently been studied in any length in Jane Bledsoe’s Elaine de Kooning (1992) and in a series of smaller gallery publications. Furthermore, Elaine has become recognized and respected, in some cases, more for her critical writings for Art News during the 1950s and 1960s than for her art. She was an artist turned art critic, and this crossover has further complicated the scholarly attention devoted to her. Elaine consistently revisited male-inspired subject matter: in her portraiture she painted predominantly male sitters; in her cave painting-inspired work she reflected a society of primitive male hunters; in her series of sports paintings she depicted male basketball and baseball players in dynamic postures; in her Bacchus series she investigated a male god and the vitality of the statue’s writhing male musculature; and in her bull and bison series she worked with the clichéd animalistic symbol of masculine strength and virility. These subjects, combined with the ejaculatory style of Abstract Expressionism’s loose brushwork and vibrant swirling colors, provide a unique contrast to the artist, herself, as a female personality. / Art History / Accompanied by three .doc Microsoft Word documents.

While the neural underpinnings of concrete semantic knowledge have been studied extensively, abstract conceptual knowledge remains enigmatic. In the first experiment, participants underwent a functional MRI scan while thinking deeply about abstract and concrete words. A functional connectivity analysis revealed a cortical network, including portions of the left temporal parietal cortex (TPC), that showed coordinated activity specific to abstract word processing. Alternatively, concrete words led to cooperation of a network in the inferior, middle and polar temporal lobes. In a second experiment, participants with focal lesions in the left TPC, as well as matched control participants, were tested on a spoken-to-written word matching task, in which they were asked to select either an abstract or concrete word, from an array of words that were related or unrelated to the target. The results revealed an interaction between concreteness and relatedness. Participants with lesions did not have an overall deficit for abstract words, relative to concrete words, in this task. However, their accuracy was significantly lower for abstract words in related arrays, compared to words in unrelated arrays. These results confirm that the TPC plays an important role in abstract concept representation, and that it is part of a larger network of functionally cooperative regions needed for abstract word processing. These results also provide converging evidence that abstract concepts rely on neural networks that are independent from those involved in concrete concepts, and have important implications for existing accounts of the neural representation of semantic memory. / Psychology

We present a system for the inference of various static properties from source code written in the Maple programming language. We make use of an abstract interpretation framework in the design of these properties and define languages of constraints specific to our abstract domains which capture the desired static properties of the code. Finally we discuss the automated generation and solution of these constraints, describe a tool for doing so, and present some results from applying this tool to several nontrivial test inputs. / Thesis / Master of Science (MSc)

The Chinese language features a rich class of words called measure words that serve as units for counting objects and actions. In comparison with English and other Indo-European languages, Chinese makes much more extensive use of measure words. American students who study Chinese as a second language often find it hard to acquire the usage of Chinese measure words. To obtain a comprehensive and objective evaluation of students’ measure words acquisition, I designed an experiment where measure words as introduced in Integrated Chinese are collected. In the current study, measure words are divided into two categories by their semantic features: Concrete Measure Words and Abstract Measure Words. If a measure word directly relates to its object’s concrete exterior shape, and image thought plays an important role when people try to use this measure word, it is called a concrete measure word. Abstract measure words are those which have no obvious relation to an object’s exterior image, and whose usages mainly rely on people’s abstract thought. Students are divided into two grades based on how long they have studied Chinese: Grade 1 and Grade 2. Survey results show that students’ acquisition of concrete measure words is significantly better than their acquisition of abstract measure words. Furthermore, there is no obvious difference between measure words acquisition of the two grades; visual aids can facilitate concrete measure words acquisition to some extent. Conclusions of survey results reveal some practical principles of measure words teaching. First, concrete measure words and abstract measure words should be treated differently in classroom teaching. Second, different teaching strategies should be adopted to teach students from different grades. Third, analyzing semantic features and providing visual aids are useful methods when teaching concrete measure words. This thesis includes five chapters. Chapter One summarizes related work in previous studies and points out the importance of future research on Chinese measure words acquisition. Chapter Two focuses on the design of the survey where experimental settings, including objects, participants, survey design, and study methods, are introduced. In Chapter Three, I discuss the experimental results in more detail and summarize typically misused measure words. Chapter Four focuses on the teaching material study where I analyze the arrangements of contents related to measure words, and discuss the merits and shortcomings of the teaching materials currently used. In the last chapter, I summarize some suggestions on teaching strategies inspired by this study.

This dissertation addresses the problem of making system level design (SLD) methodology based on SystemC more useful to the complex embedded system design community by presenting a number of ingredients currently absent in the existing SLD methodologies and frameworks. The complexity of embedded systems have been increasing at a rapid rate due to proliferation of desired functionality of such systems (e.g., cell phones, game consoles, hand-held devices, etc., are providing more features every few months), and the device technology still riding the curve predicted by Moore's law. Design methodology is shifting slowly towards system level design (also called electronic system level (ESL)). A number of SLD languages and supporting frameworks are being proposed. SystemC is positioned as being one of the dominant SLD languages. The various design automation tool vendors are proposing frameworks for supporting SystemC-based design methodologies. We believe that compared to the necessity and potential of ESL, the success of the frameworks have been limited due to lack of support for a number of facilities and features in the languages and tool environments. This dissertation proposes, formulates, and provides proof of concept demonstrations of a number of ingredients that we have identified as essential for efficient and productive use of SystemC-based tools and techniques. These are heterogeneity in the form of multiple models of computation, behavioral hierarchy in addition to structural hierarchy, model-driven validation for SystemC designs and a service-oriented tool integration environment. In particular, we define syntactic extensions to the SystemC language, semantic modifications, and simulation algorithms, precise semantics for model based validation etc. For each of these we provide reference implementation for further experimentation on the utility of these extensions. / Ph. D.

I examined the development of three Prospective Secondary Mathematics Teachers' (PSMTs) understandings of connections between concepts in Abstract Algebra and high school Algebra, as well as their use of this understanding while engaging in the teaching practice of noticing students' mathematical thinking. I drew on the theory, Knowledge of Nonlocal Mathematics for Teaching, which suggests that teachers' knowledge of advanced mathematics can become useful for teaching when it first helps reshape their understanding of the content they teach. I examined this reshaping process by investigating how PSMTs extended, deepened, unified, and strengthened their understanding of inverses, identities, and binary operations over time. I investigated how the PSMTs' engagement in a Mathematics for Secondary Teachers course, which covered connections between inverse functions and equation solving and the abstract algebraic structures of groups and rings, supported the reshaping of their understandings. I then explored how the PSMTs used their mathematical knowledge as they engaged in the teaching practice of noticing hypothetical students' mathematical thinking. I investigated the extent to which the PSMTs' noticing skills of attending, interpreting, and deciding how to respond to student thinking developed as their mathematical understandings were reshaped. There were key similarities in how the PSMTs reshaped their knowledge of inverse, identity, and binary operation. The PSMTs all unified the additive identity, multiplicative identity, and identity function as instantiations of the same overarching identity concept. They each deepened their understanding of inverse functions. They all unified additive, multiplicative, and function inverses under the overarching inverse concept. They also strengthened connections between inverse functions, the identity function, and function composition. They all extended the contexts in which their understandings of inverses were situated to include trigonometric functions. These changes were observed across all the cases, but one change in understanding was not observed in each case: one PSMT deepened his understanding of the identity function, whereas the other two had not yet conceptualized the identity function as a function in its own right; rather, they perceived it as x, the output of the composition of inverse functions. The PSMTs had opportunities to develop these understandings in their Mathematics for Secondary Teachers course, in which the instructor led the students to reason about the inverse and identity group axioms and reflect on the structure of additive, multiplicative, and compositional inverses and identities. The course also covered the use of inverses, identities, and binary operations used while performing cancellation in the context of equation solving. The PSMTs' noticing skills improved as their mathematical knowledge was reshaped. The PSMTs' reshaped understandings supported them paying more attention to the properties and strategies evident in a hypothetical student's work and know which details were relevant to attend to. The PSMTs' reshaped understandings helped them more accurately interpret a hypothetical student's understanding of the properties, structures, and operations used in equation solving and problems about inverse functions. Their reshaped understandings also helped them give more accurate and appropriate suggestions for responding to a hypothetical student in ways that would build on and improve the student's understanding. / Doctor of Philosophy / Once future mathematics teachers learn about how advanced mathematics content is related to high school algebra content, they can better understand the algebra content they may teach. The future teachers in this study took a Mathematics for Secondary Teachers course during their senior year of college. This course gave them opportunities to make connections between advanced mathematics and high school mathematics. After this course, they better understood the mathematical properties that people use while equation solving, and they improved their teaching practice of making sense of high school students' mathematical thinking about inverses and equation solving. Overall, making connections between the advanced mathematics content they learned during college and the algebra content related to inverses and equation solving that they teach in high school helped them improve their teaching practice.

In developing the study, the writer has attempted to devise a method whereby high-school students may gain an understanding of certain trends in modern abstract and non-objective painting.

In this research, I set out to elucidate the relationships that might exist between students' conceptual understanding upon which they draw in their proof activity. I explore these relationships using data from individual interviews with three students from a junior-level Modern Algebra course. Each phase of analysis was iterative, consisting of iterative coding drawing on grounded theory methodology (Charmaz, 2000, 2006; Glaser and Strauss, 1967). In the first phase, I analyzed the participants' interview responses to model their conceptual understanding by drawing on the form/function framework (Saxe, et al., 1998). I then analyzed the participants proof activity using Aberdein's (2006a, 2006b) extension of Toulmin's (1969) model of argumentation. Finally, I analyzed across participants' proofs to analyze emerging patterns of relationships between the models of participants' understanding of identity and inverse and the participants' proof activity. These analyses contributed to the development of three emerging constructs: form shifts in service of sense-making, re-claiming, and lemma generation. These three constructs provide insight into how conceptual understanding relates to proof activity. / Ph. D.