The natural immune system embodies a wealth of information processing capabilities that can be exploited as a metaphor for the development of artificial immune systems. Chief among these features is the ability to recognize previously encountered substances and to generalize beyond recognition in order to provide appropriate responses to pathogens not seen before. This thesis presents a new supervised learning paradigm, resource limited artificial immune classifiers, inspired by mechanisms exhibited in natural and artificial immune systems. The key abstractions gleaned from these immune systems include resource competition, clonal selection, affinity maturation, and memory cell retention. A discussion of the progenitors of this work is offered. This work provides a thorough explication of a resource limited artifical immune classification algorithm, named AIRS (Artificial Immune Recognition System). Experimental results on both simulated data sets and real world machine learning benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of the AIRS algorithm as a classification technique.

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This dissertation extends the media effects literature into the realm of social media. Scholars have long known that partisan news contributes to political polarization, but claim that such effects are often limited to those who tune into politics. Social media, however, can filter political information to those typically uninterested in politics. Because social media feature entertainment and political news in the same space, entertainment-seekers may inadvertently see political news that they normally avoid in traditional media contexts. Through a combination of observational research, survey experiments, and field experiments, I demonstrate that social media facilitate personal influence, drawing new audiences to political news. This increased exposure to partisan media contributes to political polarization, regardless of the ideological congruence between source and receiver, or of news- or entertainment-seeking habits of the audience. But the most important contributions of this dissertation are how it demonstrates the need for scholars to use innovative methods that incorporate personal influence into social media studies, and that it draws scholarly attention to inadvertent media effects for entertainment-seeking audiences. Social media bring political news to new audiences numbering in the millions. Political communication scholars would be remiss not to investigate their influence. / Political Science

Remembrance of one's personal past and the development of false memories have recently received intense public scrutiny. Based upon self-schema (Markus, 1977) and self-verification (Swann, 1987) theories, two studies were conducted to investigate the hypothesis that a self-schema guides cognitive processing of self-relevant information and thereby influences the construction of a memory that includes false information, particularly more so if this information is self-schema consistent than inconsistent. Study 2 also investigated the hypothesis that the cognitive processing goal of understanding a negative outcome (motivated cognition) would interact with self-consistent expectations to enhance the likelihood that a false memory would be created. Self-schematic Type A and Type B individuals (only self-schematic Type A individuals participated in Study 2) participated in a team problem solving task (the to-be-remembered event) and returned a week later for a "questionnaire" session during which a narrative was read that contained self-consistent or self-discrepant false information. In both studies, chi-square analyses showed participants given self-consistent false information were more likely to report this information on a recall and a recognition test than were participants given self-discrepant false information. Study 2 included team performance feedback (failure or neutral), which was presented just before participants read the narrative containing the false information. The purpose of this procedure was to assess the moderating effect of motivated cognitive processes on the acceptance of self-consistent false information on memory. A loglinear analysis provided confirmation for the expected interaction. The following pattern was obtained for false recall and false self-description (description of team problem solving behavior using the false information trait adjectives): Consistent/failure > Consistent/neutral > Discrepant/neutral = Discrepant/failure. Unexpectedly, this pattern was not obtained on the recognition test data. These findings expand current understanding of processes that contribute to the production of a false memory and extend the traditional, post event false information paradigm. The results are discussed in the context of the false memory debate and future research directions are noted. / Ph. D.

The AICPA recently released new authoritative audit guidance related to group audits of nonpublic organizations which requires group engagement teams to be involved in the work of a component auditor, including certain minimum baseline requirements and the option for more extensive involvement at the group auditor's discretion. Accordingly, group audits create a scenario where auditors are under the direct oversight of a component audit supervisor, yet their work product is monitored and used by the group engagement team when expressing an opinion on the group financial statements. To my knowledge, prior accounting research has not explored the complexity of auditor decision making in a group audit scenario. Drawing on theory from motivated reasoning, this study investigates how the level of group engagement team involvement in component audit work may influence auditor decision making when a component audit supervisor has expressed preferences for more or less professional skepticism during the component audit process. Prior research in non-group audit settings finds the preferences of audit supervisors can influence the skepticism exhibited by their subordinates. However, in a group audit setting I find that the effects of component supervisor preferences interact with the level of group engagement team involvement in component auditors' work to influence component auditors' budgeted audit hours and planned substantive audit procedures. Results showed that during an accounts receivable audit planning task, auditors who faced an optimistic component supervisor recommended the use of more audit hours and suggested confirming a greater percentage of the accounts receivable balance when a group engagement team chose to be more actively involved in the component audit process than when the group engagement team chose only to review component audit work. However, there were no differences in budgeted audit hours or planned audit procedures when auditors faced a skeptical component supervisor, regardless of the level of group engagement team involvement. Thus, increased involvement of the group engagement team mitigated the influence of an optimistic component supervisor on auditor decision making, but did not significantly influence component auditor judgments when auditors faced a more conservative component supervisor. Path analyses indicated this phenomenon was caused by auditors' sense of pressure to reach appropriate audit conclusions induced by the increased involvement of the group engagement team. These results suggest that the effects of supervisor preferences are complex within a group audit environment, such that the nature of instructions received from a group engagement team may mitigate the effects of supervisor preferences on component auditor decision making. This research has implications for audit practice as it relates to the implementation of the new group audit standard as well as for regulators who establish future auditing guidance. / Ph. D.

The dissertation examines mainly segmental assimilatory processes of Xhosa phonology within the dependency framework. This model is a multi-faceted approach which involves hierarchical organisation of features into larger constituents known as gestures. The analysis includes an elementary historical background to the development of phonological theory with emphasis on the shift from traditional linear approaches to modern non-linear models, as well as a shift from derivational theories to representational frameworks. An exploration of the phonetics/phonology interface through the application of gestures is considered an advantage of using the dependency framework over other theories of phonology. The focus of the dissertation is the description of phonetically-motivated and morphologically-motivated Xhosa phonological processes. A brief exposition of the use of the dependency framework in non-assimilatory Xhosa phonological processes is given as a possible recommendation in the conclusion of the dissertation. / Language Education, Arts and Culture / M.A. (African Languages)

The dissertation examines mainly segmental assimilatory processes of Xhosa phonology within the dependency framework. This model is a multi-faceted approach which involves hierarchical organisation of features into larger constituents known as gestures. The analysis includes an elementary historical background to the development of phonological theory with emphasis on the shift from traditional linear approaches to modern non-linear models, as well as a shift from derivational theories to representational frameworks. An exploration of the phonetics/phonology interface through the application of gestures is considered an advantage of using the dependency framework over other theories of phonology. The focus of the dissertation is the description of phonetically-motivated and morphologically-motivated Xhosa phonological processes. A brief exposition of the use of the dependency framework in non-assimilatory Xhosa phonological processes is given as a possible recommendation in the conclusion of the dissertation. / Language Education, Arts and Culture / M.A. (African Languages)