Sexuality acts as a societal arbiter; the further away one is from the norm, the more marginalized one becomes. As a result, sexuality forces us to ask the question of,  “who deserves love, and who should we extend it to?” These questions become paramount in stories that present love towards nonhuman subjects. Lars and the Real Girl, a movie about a man who falls in love with a sex doll; The Shape of Water, a fantasy romance between a mute woman and an amphibious man; and The Goat, or Who is Sylvia?, a play that features a man who has an affair with a goat, will be the base texts being analyzed. These stories question the structures we have in place for what we do and don't tolerate as love: what's wrong with loving a goat? To answer this question, I imagine love as a scale, with all the things in between the most normative love - white, heterosexual, and cis - and bestiality examined. Where do we draw the line between good, valid love and bad, invalid love and why? Using queer theory, a framework already populated with these questions, I analyzed these texts. There is a pervasive idea that writing about love has become a cliché and naïve pursuit. However, this thought has stifled the nuances that exist within the concept and erases the populations it has already marginalized. It is a delicate situation, but examining our desire, from the possible to the impossible, may illuminate what we believe is ethical. For without straying into the uncomfortable, we cannot challenge a norm. Rethinking perspectives and coming to a more complete and inclusive concept of love can be the value of these narratives of nonhuman desires.

One issue in many medical applications is detecting the presence of forced exhalations or breaths through audio data. For example, analysing sleep disorder breathing or analysing a person's lung function from audio of their exhalation first requires localization of a breath event in an audio file. Past work has focused on extensive feature extraction from sound and machine learning methods to detect these events. However, these black box methods require significant feature engineering dependent on the type of exhalation and environment the audio data is recorded to find the start and end of an exhalation event. We present a novel method for detecting the start and end of forced exhalations for spirometry, a medical test of lung function, in audio files. The algorithm requires an initial set of audio files containing exhalations to be manually labelled for locations where exhalations can be heard. Then, we build an envelope which encapsulates the shape of our exhalation signal. We take the cross-correlation of this initial envelope with vast amounts of unlabelled audio data containing exhalations, and use the estimated locations of exhalation events to recalculate the envelope. We repeat this process with the new envelopes until convergence. The converged envelope is then used to autocorrelate an audio signal to detect the start and end of exhalation. While preliminary results show that this method only achieves comparable performance to ad-hoc approaches currently used compared to human labels, it has the benefit of being simpler and more interpretable, enabling easier improvements and runtime of the algorithm.

Following the 2008 financial collapse conversations about understanding personal finance have expanded in the United States. Although government, educators and economists have varying interpretations of the term “financial literacy,” it is generally agreed upon that people need more financial knowledge. Under the assumption that early conversations are useful tools for families to learn about money together, I developed the following hypothesis in my study: engagement with hands-on activities and reading will encourage children and their guardians to talk with each other about money more frequently. The study lent itself best to participatory action research and was developed in partnership with Compass Housing Alliance, an organization which provides housing for formerly homeless families. First, children’s books were identified that incorporated the topic of money and centered the experiences of children from ethnically and economically diverse backgrounds. Students from the UW iSchool’s Master of Library and Information Science were invited to utilize these books for a one-day Read-a-Rama event titled “Let’s Talk About Money.” Founded by UW iSchool Professor Dr. Martin, Read-a-Rama is an immersive literacy program, featuring hands-on activities, group, and individual reading time for children ages 4-11. Before and after the event, parents and guardians of participants were invited to indicate the frequency with which they spoke to their children about money. Through anonymous survey questions and observation notes, the engagement of children with the topic and the potential impacts of the program were explored through anonymous survey questions and observation notes. Following Read-a-Rama, I expected some parents to indicate that they would talk with their children more frequently about money. Observation notes and survey outcomes might aid librarians, educators, and other stakeholders who aim to engage families on the topic of money in alignment with children’s literacy development.

Bivalves, such as oysters, clams, and mussels, have critical roles to play in both the food chain and water quality in Puget Sound. However, if adult bivalve populations are faltering, it is imperative that we learn more about their larval phase, to ensure that the population is sustained. Bivalve larvae are not sessile, and they are not completely mobile, but can orient and move themselves on small scales. The purpose of this project is to determine if bivalve larvae prefer to stay within eelgrass beds depending on the time of day. It is hypothesized that bivalve larvae may stay within eelgrass beds to hide from potential predators. In order to better understand the habitat-level behavior of bivalve larvae, samples were collected during the summer of 2015 at 4 locations around Washington State: Fidalgo Bay, Port Gamble, Case Inlet, and Willapa Bay. Besides the location, key sampling variables included: time of day (light or dark), and substrate (eelgrass or bare). Samples were analyzed by hand-counting all bivalve larvae found through polarized light microscopy. Counts of both specific species, and total bivalves found were collected. The results of this project are still pending; however, this data could be useful to shellfish growers, and any persons responsible for identifying areas for habitat restoration work. With increasing world water temperatures and acidity due to climate change, eelgrass beds, have the potential to be a refuge from these effects. Therefore, this data would be important to predict the effects of ocean acidification and warming on all species of bivalves in all life stages. 

Olympia oysters (Ostrea lurida) are the only native oyster species in Washington State. Over the past 100 years populations have dwindled, but due to restoration efforts, Olympia oysters are slowly recovering. So far there is limited information about the behavior during the larval stage. Previous observations suggest that larvae would be more abundant at the surface compared to the bottom of the water column. In this study, we measured the spatial distribution of larvae at surface and bottom depths in Fidalgo Bay, WA during the Summer of 2013. Plankton samples were taken from 4 intertidal and 2 subtidal stations pumping 100L of seawater through a 75 µm sieve. Olympia oyster larvae were identified using light microscopy, measured for shell height and length, and tallied to determine abundance and distribution. As predicted, larvae were not randomly distributed across the bay, and more larvae were found at the surface for each site. We found an order of magnitude of more larvae at surface depths during ebb tide, indicating that larvae are being transported out of the bay. These results are being combined with additional temporal and spatial sampling, as well as environmental data, to fully describe the larval distribution of oysters in the bay. This study will improve restoration efforts as well as inform researchers and local communities about the early life stages of Olympia oysters.

Although bedtime stories are often read to children as a part of their nightly sleep routines, how sleep is depicted between these books varies. Thus, our research's primary purpose is to examine how sleep behaviors and habits are portrayed in sleep-related bedtime books in order determine whether or not these books actually depict positive sleep routines. We hypothesize that majority of bedtime stories available on the market contain a low percentage of pages that demonstrate positive nighttime routines and sleep benefits. To support our purpose, we selected 200 sleep-related children's books to be analyzed by two different evaluators. Books were selected based on their availability from the library and Amazon and association with keywords relating to children's books about sleep. As part of our qualitative analysis, we utilized rating sheets containing Yes-No ratings and Likert scales in order to examine a wide variety of characteristics including number of positive and negative sleep pages and the protagonist's activities prior to and at bedtime. With this research, we can hopefully relate this back to how book's positive and/or negative sleep routines translate into children's nighttime routines. We expect that most of the books analyzed had more negative sleep pages than positive ones, 54% of all pages were directly related to sleep and 45% of those pages included positive sleep behaviors. Similarly, very few bedtime stories contained parental participation in the protagonist’s bedtime routine with 53% of analyzed books receiving a rating of “none” or “low” in this category. 

Lipopolysaccharide (LPS) is a bacterial membrane surface antigen that potently stimulates the immune system. In response to LPS, immune cells release cytokines and chemokines that propagate the immune response. LPS and cytokines can increase in the circulation during infections, which may cause disruption of the blood-brain barrier (BBB). BBB disruption results in leakage of circulating factors into the brain, which can damage neurons. Because there are known sex differences in the immune response, we aimed to determine in mice whether sex and strain affect LPS-induced BBB disruption, and assess cytokine expression patterns in blood and brain that may contribute to sex or strain differences. To test this, we injected different strains of male and female mice, C57 and CD-1, with three different LPS doses or with saline. BBB disruption and the levels of 23 cytokines were evaluated 28 hours later. We found that only the highest dose of LPS induced significant BBB disruption in all sexes and strains. The severity of BBB disruption to the highest LPS dose significantly differed between sexes and strains, and ranked CD-1 male < CD-1 female < C57 male < C57 female. Two-way ANOVA revealed significant sex and strain effects on BBB disruption in the high-dose LPS group, with 14.83 % of the variance attributable to sex, and 24.46% attributable to strain. Cytokines showed distinct profiles in brain and blood among sex and strain following LPS treatment. In blood, interleukin-10, keratinocyte chemoattractant, and interleukin-12(p40) trends in sex and strain paralleled those found for BBB disruption, and IL-12(p70) showed an opposite trend. Our results indicate that the severity of BBB disruption to LPS is partially dependent on sex and strain, with mouse strain having a greater effect. Future directions are warranted to determine whether cytokines identified in this study are causal in the BBB response to LPS.

By only focusing on a single element in the media-sleep relationship such as violence or vigilance, conclusions drawn from current research are limited in usefulness when developing targeted interventions in clinical settings. Thus, the SLUMBER study seeks to extend upon this research by exploring the elemental characteristics of bedtime media use associated with sleep problems in early adolescents. After expanding upon the V2 Matrix, researchers hopefully gain a more holistic view of video game features that may impact sleep. The V2 Matrix is a rating sheet that allows rating based on game characteristics including violence, vigilance, art style and perspective. However, due to the subjective results from having individual raters, a training and rating protocol was developed to standardize the rating process in a way that is accessible and produces consistent data for researchers. Together, the V2 Matrix and the rating protocol allow us to identify the media content and design characteristics that affect the media-sleep relationship as well as behavior and health. 53 total versions of 42 different mobile games were rated using the V2 Matrix. From data across three entries, we found that games with high continuous vigilance (34.58%) and games with no vigilance (24.5%) make up the largest segments of our current game pool respectively in terms of vigilance. When looking at harm and violence, games with no violence (42.14%) and low violence (21.38%) make up the largest segments of the game pool, respectively. Additionally, a large majority of games contain no gore (68.5%). Concluding, we hope to develop a massive searchable database of game ratings across a broad spectrum of platforms and genres for researchers and primary care providers. In doing so, we will widen the scope of research into the relationships between media, childhood sleep, and behavioral health and develop more individualized interventions and recommendations.