The Ohio State University Newark

Abstract Prosody includes the pitch, timing and loudness in speech, which can convey meaning and emotion. This study examines whether prosodic categories affect novel noun learning and whether the referent characteristic influence learning. Previous research showed that emotional prosody interfered with adults’ noun learning (West et al., 2017), but it had no effect on children (West et al., 2022). However, these researchers varied their method across ages, including animacy and complexity of the referent, and it is unclear if the results extend beyond the three emotional prosodies tested. Participants in the current set of studies heard novel words presented in five prosodic categories (within-subject) in order to learn the label for either animate or inanimate objects (between-subject). Study 1 compared inanimate objects and aliens, with better noun learning performance for inanimate objects. Study 2 compared inanimate objects with the same objects with faces added, but there was no difference in noun learning by object type. Both studies showed differences in noun learning by the prosodic category, with warning less accurate than naming. These results demonstrate how extralinguistic factors like prosody, attention and referent complexity influence noun learning.

Objective: Imposterism and academic self-handicapping (ASH) are related to negative outcomes in college students. We examined whether the relationship between imposterism and academic goal orientations is mediated by ASH across men and women and for students who are underrepresented on campus. Participants: Participants were 852 undergraduates (29.1% men, 26.1% first-generation, and 22.1% from underrepresented racial/ethnic groups at the predominantly white institution (PWI) where data was gathered). Methods: Participants completed self-report scales assessing imposterism, ASH, and academic goal orientation. Results: ASH partially mediated the relationship of imposterism to mastery and performance approach academic goal orientations. High imposterism was directly related to high performance-avoidance orientation. Our model was invariant to gender; while it did not appear to be invariant to underrepresented status, this was accounted for by first-generation student status. Conclusions: Results have implications for the classroom and creation of interventions to minimize ASH and imposterism and their impact on student success.

It is relatively unknown which species of bees utilize pipeline Right of Ways. Most recent Right of Way research focuses on bees found on electrical transmission Right of Ways instead. Ohio is also relatively understudied in terms of bee richness. This project sought to document bees that are found in these pipeline Right of Ways in 4 heavily forested counties in eastern Ohio. A total of 3950 specimens were collected, accounting for 140 species across two years of sampling (2016 and 2018). Overall bee abundance peaked mid-season, with the highest abundance observed in July. The majority of bees collected were solitary, floral generalist species. The most abundant species, Augochlora pura (Say), accounted for over 20% of all specimens collected. The other most common species were Apis mellifera Linnaeus, Augochlorella aurata (Smith), Bombus impatiens Cresson, Ceratina calcarata Robertson, Ceratina mikmaqi Rehan and Sheffield, Halictus ligatus Say, Lasioglossum cressonii (Robertson), Lasioglossum coriaceum (Smith), and Lasioglossum versatum (Robertson). Eight bee species were not native to Ohio, though the most common non-native species was the human reared Western Honey Bee, A. mellifera. Nine bee species were also cleptoparasites of other bees, though overall cleptoparasite numbers were low, accounting for only 15 specimens. Several uncommon specialist bees were also documented including Cemolobus ipomoeae (Robertson), and Osmia texana Cresson. Overall, this study serves as a baseline for understanding the species of bees that occur in managed pipeline Right of Ways in eastern Ohio.

Unsettled Borders: The Militarized Science of Surveillance on Sacred Indigenous Land. 2020. By Felicity Amaya Schaeffer. Durham: Duke University Press. 207pp. $102.95 (hardback), $26.95 (paperback).

Maxwell’s equations and quantum electrodynamics are valid for any value of the permittivity ϵ0 of the vacuum; therefore, something additional is required to establish the value of ϵ0. A fundamental postulate of physics is that the properties of a physical system are determined by its structure. Since ϵ0 is an electromagnetic property of the vacuum, it should be possible to calculate ϵ0 using Maxwell’s equations and quantum electrodynamics to describe the interaction of photons with the quantum vacuum. The feature of the quantum vacuum that allows for such interactions is the presence of vacuum fluctuations that appear as particle-antiparticle pairs. To minimize the violation of energy conservation and conserve angular momentum, the pair appears with zero center-of-mass momentum in the most tightly bound state that has zero angular momentum. Because vacuum fluctuations each appear as a bound state, the permittivity of the vacuum can be calculated somewhat similarly to the way that the permittivity of a dielectric is calculated, yielding ϵ0 ≃ (6μ o/π)(8e 2/ħ)2 = 9.10 × 10−12C/(Vm), which is 2.8% larger than the experimental value. Formulas for the speed of light in the vacuum and the fine-structure constant follow immediately from the formula for ϵ0.