Digital Commons Network^™

Diving Deep Into Dissertations: Analyzing Graduate Students’ Methodological And Data Practices To Inform Research Data Services And Subject Liaison Librarian Support, Mandy Swygart-Hobaugh M.L.S., Ph.D., Raeda Anderson, Denise George, Joel Glogowski

University Library Faculty Publications

We present findings from an exploratory quantitative content analysis case study of 156 doctoral dissertations from Georgia State University that investigates doctoral student researchers’ methodology practices (used quantitative, qualitative, or mixed methods) and data practices (used primary data, secondary data, or both). We discuss the implications of our findings for provision of data support services provided by the Georgia State University Library’s Research Data Services (RDS) Team and subject liaison librarians in the areas of instructional services, data software support and licensing advocacy, collection development, marketing/outreach, and professional development/expansion.

Supporting “Big Data” Research At Georgia State University (Gsu), Kelsey Jordan, Bryan Sinclair, Mandy J. Swygart-Hobaugh M.L.S., Ph.D., Jeremy Walker

University Library Faculty Publications

From Summer 2020 to Summer 2021, a team of Georgia State University (GSU) University Library faculty took part in a multi-institutional research study coordinated by the Ithaka S+R research and consulting organization to examine the research support needs of faculty doing “big data” research. Drawing from semi-structured interviews with eight GSU researchers representing a diverse cross-section of academic fields, this report offers the following insights from participation in the study: (1) identifies the key research support needs and associated challenges faced by GSU faculty who engage in “big data” research, and (2) offers possible paths toward improved support of GSU …

Connectivity: Insights From The U.S. Long Term Ecological Research Network, David M. Iwaniec, Michael Gooseff, Katharine Suding, David Samuel Johnson, Daniel C. Reed, Debra Peters, Byron Adams, John E. Barrett, Brandon Bestelmeyer, Max C.N. Castorani, Elizabeth M. Cook, Melissa J. Davidson, Peter F. Groffman, Niall Hanan, Laura Huenneke, Pieter T.J. Johnson, Diane Mcknight, Robert J. Miller, Gregory Okin, Daniel Preston, Andrew Rassweiler, Chris Ray, Osvaldo Sala, Robert L. Schooley, Timothy Seastedt, Marko Spasojevic, Enrique R. Vivoni

Sustainable Futures Lab Publications

Ecosystems across the United States are changing in complex and surprising ways. Ongoing demand for critical ecosystem services requires an understanding of the populations and communities in these ecosystems in the future. This paper represents a synthesis effort of the U.S. National Science Foundation-funded Long-Term Ecological Research (LTER) network addressing the core research area of “populations and communities.” The objective of this effort was to show the importance of long-term data collection and experiments for addressing the hardest questions in scientific ecology that have significant implications for environmental policy and management. Each LTER site developed at least one compelling case …

Illicit Activity Detection In Large-Scale Dark And Opaque Web Social Networks, Dhara Shah, T. G. Harrison, Christopher B. Freas, David Maimon, Robert W. Harrison

EBCS Articles

Many online chat applications live in a grey area between the legitimate web and the dark net. The Telegram network in particular can aid criminal activities. Telegram hosts “chats” which consist of varied conversations and advertisements. These chats take place among automated “bots” and human users. Classifying legitimate activity from illegitimate activity can aid law enforcement in finding criminals. Social network analysis of Telegram chats presents a difficult problem. Users can change their username or create new accounts. Users involved in criminal activity often do this to obscure their identity. This makes establishing the unique identity behind a given username …

Examining The Crime Prevention Claims Of Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design On System-Trespassing Behaviors: A Randomized Experiment, Daren Fisher, David Maimon, Tamar Berenblum

EBCS Articles

Crime prevention through environmental design (CPTED) is a non-punitive method for reducing crime through the design of the built environment. The relevance of CPTED strategies however is less clear in the context of computing environments. Building upon prior research indicating that computing environments may change computer users’ behaviors, this study tests the effectiveness of CPTED based approaches in mitigating system trespassing events. Findings from this randomized controlled field trial demonstrate that specific CPTED strategies can mitigate hacking events by: reducing the number of concurrent activities on the target computer, attenuating the number of commands typed in the attacked computer, and …

Improving Grading And Feedback Of Programming Assignments Using Version Control: An Experience Report, Jillian Morgan, Michael Weeks

Computer Science Technical Reports

Leaving meaningful, actionable feedback that students will read and, most importantly, follow-up on, is essential for strengthening their programming skills. In addition, being capable with version control platforms, such as git, is a desired skill in industry. Could a marriage between the two, leaving meaningful feedback for student submissions in a version control system, lead them to be better programmers while improving the time and quality of instructors’ feedback? This experience report describes how we used GitHub Classroom for programming assignment submission and assessment in CS2. We provide examples of typical feedback using various assessment mechanisms, describe the process of …

The Restrictive Deterrent Effect Of Warning Messages Sent To Active Romance Fraudsters: An Experimental Approach, Fangzhou Wang, C. Jordan Howell, David Maimon, Scott Jacques

EBCS Articles

Victims of romance fraud experience both a financial and emotional burden. Although multiple studies have offered insight into the correlates of perpetration and victimization, no known study has examined if, and how, romance fraud can be curtailed. The current study uses a randomized experimental design to test the restrictive deterrent effect of warning messages sent to romance fraudsters via email. We find that active romance fraudsters who receive a deterrence message, instead of non-deterrence messages, respond at a lower rate; and, among those who respond, use fewer words and have a lower probability of seeking reply without denying wrongdoing. The …

Situational Awareness And Public Wi-Fi Users' Self-Protective Behaviors, David Maimon, C. Jordan Howell, Scott Jacques, Robert Perkins

EBCS Articles

Accessing public Wi-Fi networks can be as dangerous as it is convenient. People who access a public Wi-Fi network should engage in self-protective behaviors to keep their data safe from malicious actors on the same network as well as persons looking over their shoulder, literally and proverbially. Using two independent research designs, we examined under what circumstances were people more likely to access an unsecured Wi-Fi network and engage in risky behavior on these networks. Findings from the first study, based on survey data, reveal that people who are more situationally aware are less likely to access personal accounts on …

Deterrence In Cyberspace: An Interdisciplinary Review Of The Empirical Literature, David Maimon

EBCS Articles

The popularity of the deterrence perspective across multiple scientific disciplines has sparked a lively debate regarding its relevance in influencing both offenders and targets in cyberspace. Unfortunately, due to the invisible borders between academic disciplines, most of the published literature on deterrence in cyberspace is confined within unique scientific disciplines. This chapter therefore provides an interdisciplinary review of the issue of deterrence in cyberspace. It begins with a short overview of the deterrence perspective, presenting the ongoing debates concerning the relevance of deterrence pillars in influencing cybercriminals’ and cyberattackers’ operations in cyberspace. It then reviews the existing scientific evidence assessing …

Attacking And Securing Beacon-Enabled 802.15.4 Networks, Sang Shin Jung, Marco Valero, Anu G. Bourgeois, Raheem Beyah

EBCS Articles

The IEEE 802.15.4 standard has attracted timecritical applications in wireless sensor networks because of its beacon-enabled mode and guaranteed timeslots (GTSs). However, the GTS management scheme’s security mechanisms still leave the 802.15.4 medium access control vulnerable to attacks. Further, the existing techniques in the literature for securing 802.15.4 networks either focus on nonbeacon-enabled 802.15.4 networks or cannot defend against insider attacks for beacon-enabled 802.15.4 networks. In this paper, we illustrate this by demonstrating attacks on the availability and integrity of the beaconenabled 802.15.4 network. To confirm the validity of the attacks, we implement the attacks using Tmote Sky motes for …

What Can We Learn From X‐Ray Fluorescence Core Scanning Data? A Paleomonsoon Case Study, Daniel Gebregiorgis, Liviu Giosan, Edmund Hathorne, Pallavi Anand, Katrina Nilsson-Kerr, Anna Plaß, Andreas Lückge, Steven Clemens, Martin Frank

Geosciences Faculty Publications

X‐ray fluorescence (XRF) core scanning of marine and lake sediments has been extensively used to study changes in past environmental and climatic processes over a range of timescales. The interpretation of XRF‐derived element ratios in paleoclimatic and paleoceanographic studies primarily considers differences in the relative abundances of particular elements. Here we present new XRF core scanning data from two long sediment cores in the Andaman Sea in the northern Indian Ocean and show that sea level related processes influence terrigenous inputs based proxies such as Ti/Ca, Fe/Ca, and elemental concentrations of the transition metals (e.g., Mn). Zr/Rb ratios are mainly …

Oxygen Isotopes In Authigenic Clay Minerals: Toward Building A Reliable Salinity Proxy, Daniel Gebregiorgis, Daniel M. Deocampo, Fred Longstaffe, A. Simpson, Gail M. Ashley, Emily Beverly, Jeremy Delaney, Javier Cuadros

Geosciences Faculty Publications

Most clay minerals in sedimentary environments have traditionally been considered to be of detrital origin, but under certain conditions, authigenic clay minerals can form at low temperature through the transformation of precursor clays or as direct precipitates from lake water. Such clay minerals can hold important information about the prevailing climatic conditions during the time of deposition. We present the first quantitative reconstruction of salinity in paleolake Olduvai based on the oxygen‐isotope composition of authigenic clay minerals. We provide a framework illustrating that the isotopic signature of authigenic lacustrine clay minerals is related to the isotopic composition of paleo‐waters, and …

Finding Connected-Dense-Connected Subgraphs And Variants Is Np-Hard, Dhara Shah, Sushil Prasad, Yubao Wu

Computer Science Technical Reports

Finding Connected-Dense-Connected (CDC) subgraphs from Triple Networks is NP-Hard. finding One-Connected-Dense (OCD) sub- graphs from Triple Networks is also NP-Hard. We present formal proofs of these theorems hereby.

Finding Densest Subgraph In A Bi-Partite Graph, Dhara Shah, Sushil Prasad, Danial Aghajarian

Computer Science Technical Reports

Finding the densest subgraph in a bi-partite graph is a polynomial time problem. Also, each bi-partite graph has a densest connected subgraph. In this paper, we first prove that each bi-partite graph has a densest connected subgraph. This proof is different than that of an undirected graph, since our definition of the density is different. We then provide a max-flow min-cut algorithm for finding a densest subgraph of a bi-partite graph and prove te correctness of this binary search algorithm.

An Evidence Based Cybersecurity Approach To Risk Management: Risk Management And "Market For Lemons", David Maimon

EBCS Presentations

No abstract provided.

Website Defacement And Routine Activities: Considering The Importance Of Hackers’ Valuations Of Potential Targets, C. Jordan Howell, George W. Burruss, David Maimon, Shradha Sahani

EBCS Articles

Although a relatively simple form of hacking, website defacement can have severe consequences both for the websites that are attacked and the reputation of their owners. However, criminological research has yet to fully explore the causes and correlates of website defacement. We consider whether variables derived from routine activity theory can be applied to understanding website defacement. Specifically, using a sample of websites that were targeted by hackers in 2017 across the world, we examine the relationship between a country’s structural characteristics and the frequency of website defacement reported for the country. We find that website defacements are less likely …

Digital First: The Ontological Reversal And New Challenges For Is Research, Richard L. Baskerville, Michael D. Myers, Youngjin Yoo

EBCS Articles

The classical view of an information system is that it represents and reflects physical reality. We suggest this classical view is increasingly obsolete: digital technologies are now creating and shaping physical reality. We call this phenomenon the ontological reversal. The ontological reversal is where the digital version is created first, and the physical version second (if needed). This ontological reversal challenges us to think about the role of humans and technology in society. It also challenges us to think about our role as IS scholars in this digital world and what it means for our research agendas.

Online Deception And Situations Conducive To The Progression Of Non-Payment Fraud, David Maimon, Mateus Rennó Santos, Youngsam Park

EBCS Articles

Adopting the criminal event perspective, we explore how online fraudsters make use of urgency cues in their interactions with potential victims throughout the progression of an online nonpayment fraud attempt. Integrating claims from the ‘Interpersonal-Deception Theory’ with situational explanations of crime, we investigate whether fraudsters’ presentations of verbal cues of urgency during the early stages of a criminal event are followed by a consistent presentation of verbal and non-verbal urgency cues. To answer this question, we posted a large number of ‘for-sale’ advertisements over a classified-ad website and interacted with online fraudsters and legitimate users who responded to our ads …

Ssl/Tls Certificates And Their Prevalence On The Dark Web (First Report), David Maimon, Yubao Wu, Michael Mcguire, Nicholas Stubler, Zijie Qui

EBCS Reports

As organizations focus on the digital transformation of their businesses, the importance of encryption as the cornerstone of security and privacy is increasingly vital. In 2018, over 70 percent of internet traffic was encrypted. Experts believe that this figure is expected to rise to 80 percent in 2019 (Google, 2019). Secure Sockets Layer (SSL, an older standard) and Transport Layer Security (TLS, a newer standard) certificates are essential to encryption because they authorize all encrypted communication between machines. SSL/TLS certificates are instrumental in protecting privacy and improving security, providing each machine with a unique machine identity. They control the flow …

Predicting Opioid Epidemic By Using Twitter Data, Yubao Wu, Pavel Skums, Alex Zelikovsky, David Campo Rendon, Xueting Liao

EBCS Proceedings

Opioid crisis was declared as a public health emergency in 2017 by the President of USA. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, more than 91 Americans die every day from an opioid overdose. Nearly $4B is provided to address the opioid epidemic in the 2018 spending bill and help fulfill the President’s Opioid Initiative.

How to monitor and predict the opioid epidemic accurately and in real time? The traditional methods mainly use the hospital data and usually have a lag of several years. Even though they are accurate, the long lag period prevents us from monitoring and …

High Performance Attack Estimation In Large-Scale Network Flows, Christopher B. Freas, Robert W. Harrison, Yuan Long

EBCS Proceedings

Network based attacks are the major threat to security on the Internet. The volume of traffic and the high variability of the attacks place threat detection squarely in the domain of big data. Conventional approaches are mostly based on signatures. While these are relatively inexpensive computationally, they are inflexible and insensitive to small variations in the attack vector. Therefore we explored the use of machine learning techniques on real flow data. We found that benign traffic could be identified with high accuracy.

Continuous Restricted Boltzmann Machines, Robert W. Harrison

EBCS Articles

Restricted Boltzmann machines are a generative neural network. They summarize their input data to build a probabilistic model that can then be used to reconstruct missing data or to classify new data. Unlike discrete Boltzmann machines, where the data are mapped to the space of integers or bitstrings, continuous Boltzmann machines directly use floating point numbers and therefore represent the data with higher fidelity. The primary limitation in using Boltzmann machines for big-data problems is the efficiency of the training algorithm. This paper describes an efficient deterministic algorithm for training continuous machines.

Characterization Of Α-Anomeric Damaged Dna In Complex With Endonuclease Iv Using Fluorescence Resonance Energy Transfer (Fret), Beatrice Edjah

Georgia State Undergraduate Research Conference

No abstract provided.

Synthesis Of 1-Phenyl-3,5-Diaryl-4-Bromopyrazoles, 1-Phenyl-3-T-Butyl-5-Aryl-4-Bromopyrazoles, And 1-Phenyl-3-T-Butyl-5-Aryl-4-Bromoisoxazoles., Keren Antoine, Anne K. Jean, Roseleen Almenord, Sierra A. Fleming, Titilope Akinwe, Paula Garzon, Julio C. Falcon

Georgia State Undergraduate Research Conference

No abstract provided.

Synthesis Of Cyanine Dyes And Their Use As Duplex Dna Photocleavage Agents, Hector Argueta-Gonzalez

Georgia State Undergraduate Research Conference

No abstract provided.

Characterization Of Active Site Residues In Class I Nitronate Monooxygenase From Pseudomonas Aeruginosa Pao1, Christopher Aguillon

Georgia State Undergraduate Research Conference

No abstract provided.

Sedimentary Pyrite Morphology As An Environmental Indicator And Effects On Oxidation Rates: Northern Awash Valley, Ethiopia, Saira Hamid, David Davis, Daniel Deocampo Ph.D, Christopher Campisano, Andy Cohen

Georgia State Undergraduate Research Conference

No abstract provided.

Hydration Site Of Cyclophilin A And Its Allosteric Effects On The Enzyme's Function, Abdullah Shouaib, Jonathan Lopez

Georgia State Undergraduate Research Conference

No abstract provided.

Smart Signalling For Bicycles Using User Riding Behavior, Nishant Tushar Sinha

Georgia State Undergraduate Research Conference

No abstract provided.

What Causes People To Change Their Opinion About Climate Change?, Risa Palm, Gregory B. Lewis, Bo Feng

Geosciences Faculty Publications

After a decade of steady growth in the acceptance of the existence of climate change and its anthropogenic causes, opinions have polarized, with almost one-third of Americans, mostly Republicans, denying that the climate is changing or that human activity is responsible. What causes Americans to change their minds on this issue? Using a large panel data set, we examined the impacts of direct experience with weather anomalies, ideology, relative prioritization of environmental conservation in comparison to economic development, and motivated reasoning that adjusts individual opinion to align with others who share one’s party identification. A generalized ordered logit model confirmed …