The purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of experimenter status and subject dogmatism on anagram solving. The subjects were 90 college students. Only those subjects scoring in the upper or lower thirds on the Dogmatism Scale were utilized. The same experimenter was described as being of either high or low status in each class. In the low status condition, the experimenter was introduced as a student making up an incomplete, while in the high-status condition, the experimenter was introduced as a Doctoral student doing research for a Federal Grant Agency. Therefore, four experimental groups were formed in relation to two different levels of dogmatism and two different statuses for the experimenter. A two-way analysis of variance with one covariate {Composite ACT scores to account for intellectual functioning) was computed using subject dogmatism and experimenter status as the independent variables and anagram performance as the dependent variable. It was found that neither the main affects of subject dogmatism and experimenter status, nor the interaction between the two variables were significant. Analysis of a questionnaire designed to evaluate the status manipulation indicated that the manipulation had not been effective. The problem of devising an effective status manipulation for a female experimenter was discussed in relation to future research.

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of experimenter status and subject dogmatism on anagram solving. The subjects were 90 college students. Only those subjects scoring in the upper or lower thirds on the Dogmatism Scale were utilized. The same experimenter was described as being of either high or low status in each class. In the low status condition, the experimenter was introduced as a student making up an incomplete, while in the high status condition, the experimenter was introduced as a Doctoral student doing research for a Federal Grant Agency. Therefore, four experimental groups were formed in relation to two different levels of dogmatism and two different statuses for the experimenter. A two-way analysis of variance with one covariate {Composite ACT scores to account for intellectual functioning) was computed using subject dogmatism and experimenter status as the independent variables and anagram performance as the dependent variable. It was found that neither the main affects of subject dogmatism and experimenter status, nor the interaction between the two variables were significant. Analysis of a questionnaire designed to evaluate the status manipulation indicated that the manipulation had not been effective. The problem of devising an effective status manipulation for a female experimenter was discussed in relation to future research.

This PhD thesis is comprised of 3 results in computational geometry and graph theory. In the first paper, I demonstrate that the piercing number of a set S of pairwise intersecting convex shapes in the plane is bounded by O(\alpha(S)), where \alpha(S) is the fatness of the set S, improving upon the previous upper-bound of O(\alpha(S)^2). In the second article, I show that anagram-free vertex colouring of a 2\times n square grid requires a number of colours that increases with n. This answers an open question in Wilson's thesis and shows that even graphs of pathwidth 2 do not have anagram-free colouring with a bounded number of colours. The third article is a study on the geodesic anagram-free chromatic number of chordal and interval graphs. \emph{Geodesic anagram-free chromatic number} is defined as the minimum number of colours required to colour a graph such that all shortest paths between any pair of vertices are coloured anagram-free. In particular, I prove that the geodesic anagram-free chromatic number of a chordal graph G is 32p'w, where p' is the pathwidth of the subtree intersection representation graph (tree) of G, and w is the clique number of G. Additionally, I prove that the geodesic anagram-free chromatic number of an interval graph is bounded by 32p, where p is the pathwidth of the interval graph. This PhD thesis is comprised of 3 results in computational geometry and graph theory.

BODY ANAGRAM is a number of hand stitched sculptures, a growing collection of mountable body parts that can be organized and screwed together in different ways. The process of stitching and sculpting bodies is metaphorically compared to the art of anagrams, wordplays. Their common reversibility between recognition and destruction is discussed. Psychological perspectives on intersubjective, as well as subject-object relationships are used to explain what can happen when people and sculptures meet. How can common emotional experiences of relationships be embodied through human-like textile sculptures? This question is processed in video documentations of people interacting with the sewn body parts. These meetings as well as collaborations around the making of the film, “Your hands and their hands”, are explored further in this paper.

No description available.

There has been significant growth in online social science experiments in order to understand behavior at-scale, with finer-grained data collection. Considerable work is required to perform data analytics for custom experiments. In this dissertation, we design and build composable and extensible automated software pipelines for evaluating social phenomena through iterative experiments and modeling. To reason about experiments and models, we design a formal data model. This combined approach of experiments and models has been done in some studies without automation, or purely conceptually. We are motivated by a particular social behavior, namely collective identity (CI). Group or CI is an individual's cognitive, moral, and emotional connection with a broader community, category, practice, or institution. Extensive experimental research shows that CI influences human decision-making. Because of this, there is interest in modeling situations that promote the creation of CI in order to learn more from the process and to predict human behavior in real life situations. One of our goals in this dissertation is to understand whether a cooperative anagram game can produce CI within a group. With all of the experimental work on anagram games, it is surprising that very little work has been done in modeling these games. Also, abduction is an inference approach that uses data and observations to identify plausibly (and preferably, best) explanations for phenomena. Abduction has broad application in robotics, genetics, automated systems, and image understanding, but have largely been devoid of human behavior. We use these pipelines to understand intra-group cooperation and its effect on fostering CI. We devise and execute an iterative abductive analysis process that is driven by the social sciences. In a group anagrams web-based networked game setting, we formalize an abductive loop, implement it computationally, and exercise it; we build and evaluate three agent-based models (ABMs) through a set of composable and extensible pipelines; we also analyze experimental data and develop mechanistic and data-driven models of human reasoning to predict detailed game player action. The agreement between model predictions and experimental data indicate that our models can explain behavior and provide novel experimental insights into CI. / Doctor of Philosophy / To understand individual and collective behavior, there has been significant interest in using online systems to carry out social science experiments. Considerable work is required for analyzing the data and to uncover interesting insights. In this dissertation, we design and build automated software pipelines for evaluating social phenomena through iterative experiments and modeling. To reason about experiments and models, we design a formal data model. This combined approach of experiments and models has been done in some studies without automation, or purely conceptually. We are motivated by a particular social behavior, namely collective identity (CI). Group or CI is an individual’s cognitive, moral, and emotional connection with a broader community, category, practice, or institution. Extensive experimental research shows that CI influences human decision-making, so there is interest in modeling situations that promote the creation of CI to learn more from the process and to predict human behavior in real life situations. One of our goals in this dissertation is to understand whether a cooperative anagram game can produce CI within a group. With all of the experimental work on anagrams games, it is surprising that very little work has been done in modeling these games. In addition, to identify best explanations for phenomena we use abduction. Abduction is an inference approach that uses data and observations. Abduction has broad application in robotics, genetics, automated systems, and image understanding, but have largely been devoid of human behavior. In a group anagrams web-based networked game setting we do the following. We use these pipelines to understand intra-group cooperation and its effect on fostering CI. We devise and execute an iterative abductive analysis process that is driven by the social sciences. We build and evaluate three agent-based models (ABMs). We analyze experimental data and develop models of human reasoning to predict detailed game player action. We claim our models can explain behavior and provide novel experimental insights into CI, because there is agreement between the model predictions and the experimental data.