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Open Access Publications from the University of California

Scholarly Works (22 results)

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California Italian Studies, Volume 12, Issue 1 (2023)

This essay considers Calvino’s Six Memos and other works in the context of the ‘geologic turn’ in contemporary environmental humanities. The introductory section shows how Calvino anticipated key notions now becoming prevalent in this work, including an ontology and ethics that respects “the unity of all things, animate or inanimate” (Memos). The next section, “Worlds Composed of Rocks,” rereads Calvino texts through a geologic lens—it treats “Lightness” through the lens of what Gaston Bachelard calls “the Medusa Complex,” examines geologic elements in the three retellings of the Orpheus myth in The Complete Cosmicomics, and briefly compares Calvino’s “The Stone Sky” to N.K. Jemisin’s recent geo-fiction The Stone Sky. The final section, Words Composed of Rocks, takes up Calvino’s semiotics as expressed in the Six Memos, Cosmicomics, and essays in Collection of Sand. Calvino’s interest in giving voice to natural materials is connected to Serpil Opperman’s notion of ‘Storied Matter,’ Roger Caillois’s ‘writing of stones,’ and Francis Ponge’s prose poems, among other sources. The essay features artworks and photos by the author, reflective of a contemporary merging of critical and creative engagements with literature in producing theoretical work in the geo-humanities.

    Cover page: The Petriverse of Italo CalvinoCreative Commons 'BY-NC' version 4.0 license
    • Article
    • Peer Reviewed
    Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, Volume 17 (1995)
    When tested on siuprise or preferential looking tasks, young infants show an understanding that objects continue to exist even though they are no longer directly perceivable. Only later do infants show a similar level of competence when tested on retrieval tasks. Hence, a developmental lag is apparent between infants' knowledge as measured by passive response tasks, and their ability to demonstrate that knowledge in an active retrieval task. W e jwesent a connectionist model which learns to track and initiate a motor response towards objects. The model exhibits a capacity to maintain a representation of the object even when it is no longer directly perceptible, and acquires implicit tracking competence before the ability to initiate a manual response to a hidden object. A study with infants confirms the model's prediction concerning improved tracking performance at higher object velocities. It is suggested that the developmental lag is a direct consequence of the need to co-ordinate representations which themselves emerge through learning.
      Cover page: Developing Object Permanence: A Connectionist Model
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      Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, Volume 35 (2013)
        Cover page: Preschoolers’ Trust is Sensitive to Variable Intentions
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        Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, Volume 38 (2016)
        Young children share fairly and expect others to do the same.Yet little is known about the underlying cognitivemechanisms that support fairness. Across two experiments,we investigated whether children’s numerical competenciesare linked with their sharing behavior. Preschoolers (aged2.5-5.5) participated in either third-party (Experiment 1) orfirst-party (Experiment 2) resource allocation tasks.Children’s numerical competence was then assessed using theGive-N-Task (Sarnecka & Carey, 2008; Wynn, 1990).Numerical competence – specifically knowledge of thecardinal principle explained age-related changes in fairsharing in both the third- and first-party contexts. Theseresults suggest that an understanding of the cardinal principleserves as an important mechanism for fair sharing behavior.
          Cover page: Solving the knowledge-behavior gap:Numerical cognition explains age-related changes in fairness
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          • Peer Reviewed
          Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, Volume 37 (2015)
          The capacity to use language to form new representations and to revise existing knowledge is a crucial aspect of human cognition. Here we examined whether infants can use language to adjust their existing representation of a recently encoded scene. Using an eye-tracking paradigm, we asked if 16-month-old infants (N = 26; mean age: 16;03, range: 14;15-17;15) use new linguistic information about an occluded event to inform their expectation about what the visual world should look like. We compared looking time to outcomes that matched this information to those that did not. Infants looked significantly longer when the outcome did not match the input, suggesting that they generated an expectation of the outcome based on language alone. This effect was unrelated to infants’ vocabulary size. Thus, using language to form expectations about the visual world is present at an early developmental stage, even when language skills are rudimentary.
            Cover page: 16-month-olds use language to generate expectations about the visual world
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            International Conference on GIScience Short Paper Proceedings, Volume 1, Issue 1 (2016)
              Cover page: Local variation in hedonic house pricing in Hanoi, Vietnam: a spatial analysis of status quality trade-off (SQTO) theory
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              • Peer Reviewed
              UC Irvine Previously Published Works (1979)
              We have investigated the effects of inhibitors of cellular protein synthesis (emetine, cycloheximide) and secretion (colchicine, cytochalasin B) on the capacity of primary or secondary lectin-activated human lymphocytes to release LT molecules or to cause lectin-induced destruction (LICC) of murine L-929 cells in vitro. Our findings reveal: (a) agents which inhibit protein synthesis or secretion block the release of LT activity into the supernatant and LICC when primary lectin-stimulated human adenoid lymphocytes are employed as effector cells; (b) these same agents are ineffective at blocking LT release or LICC when 3- or 5-day lectin-prestimulated lymphocytes are employed; and (c) anti-human α-LT serum blocks LICC of L-929 cells mediated by primary or secondary lectin-activated human lymphocytes. The difference in participation of effector cellular processes in LICC between primary and secondary lectin-stimulated cells correlates with the findings that preactivated lymphoid cells possess high levels of preformed intracellular, as well as membrane associated, LT molecules, and that release of these materials into the supernatant or delivery to the target cell can occur independently of active protein biosynthesis or classical secretory systems. © 1979.
                Cover page: The human LT system VII. Release of soluble forms and delivery to target L-929 cells by lectin-preactivated human lymphocytes in the absence of protein synthesis and secretory processesCreative Commons 'BY' version 4.0 license
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                UCLA Previously Published Works (2022)
                Single molecule Förster resonance energy transfer (smFRET) is a unique biophysical approach for studying conformational dynamics in biomacromolecules. Photon-by-photon hidden Markov modeling (H2MM) is an analysis tool that can quantify FRET dynamics of single biomolecules, even if they occur on the sub-millisecond timescale. However, dye photophysical transitions intertwined with FRET dynamics may cause artifacts. Here, we introduce multi-parameter H2MM (mpH2MM), which assists in identifying FRET dynamics based on simultaneous observation of multiple experimentally-derived parameters. We show the importance of using mpH2MM to decouple FRET dynamics caused by conformational changes from photophysical transitions in confocal-based smFRET measurements of a DNA hairpin, the maltose binding protein, MalE, and the type-III secretion system effector, YopO, from Yersinia species, all exhibiting conformational dynamics ranging from the sub-second to microsecond timescales. Overall, we show that using mpH2MM facilitates the identification and quantification of biomolecular sub-populations and their origin.
                  Cover page: Multi-parameter photon-by-photon hidden Markov modeling
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                  • Peer Reviewed
                  GIScience 2021 Short Paper Proceedings (2021)
                  Geographically weighted Poisson regression (GWPR) is widely used for spatial regression analysis of count data. However, it tends to be unstable because of a fundamental drawback of Poisson regression. To overcome the drawback, we introduce a log-linear approximation to estimate GWPR without relying on Poisson regression framework. The proposed approach approximates GWPR using the basic GWR modeling with transformed explained variables. Monte Carlo experiments show that the proposed GWPR outperforms the conventional GWPR in terms of both estimation accuracy and computationally efficiency. Finally, the proposed GWPR is applied to an analysis of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19).
                    Cover page: Stable geographically weighted Poisson regression for count data
                    • Article
                    • Peer Reviewed
                    UC Irvine Previously Published Works (1977)
                    Surface-associated lymphotoxin (LT) molecules have been identified on mitogen-activated human lymphocytes employing heterologous anti-α-LT serum in vitro. These membrane-associated LT molecules are present on PHA- or Con A-activated lymphocytes but do not appear to be expressed on unstimulated cells. Furthermore, these molecules were detected primarily on activated T lymphocytes, with little detectable on activated B- or null-cell populations. The removal of surface LT-bearing lymphocytes, using anti-α-LT serum + C′, does not dramatically affect the capacity of the remaining cells to release LT after mitogen restimulation. In addition, the presence of toxic molecules on the surface of activated lymphocytes suggests that these materials may be expressed in an inactive, noncytotoxic form. © 1977.
                      Cover page: Identification of membrane-associated lymphotoxin (LT) on mitogen-activated human lymphocytes using heterologous anti-LT antisera in vitroCreative Commons 'BY' version 4.0 license
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