Digital Commons Network^™

Application Essays As An Effective Tool For Assessing Instruction In The Basic Communication Course: A Follow-Up Study, Joseph P. Mazer, Cheri J. Simonds, Stephen K. Hunt

Publications

The assessment of student learning in general education courses is of critical importance in higher education. This study examines the utility of a writing assignment (application essays) in a basic communication course as an effective assessment tool. The authors conducted a content analysis of student portfolios to determine the extent to which application essays provide evidence of student learning in the basic course. The present study extends the findings from recent assessment efforts (Jones, Simonds, & Hunt, 2005) to explore types of mass media events students address in application essays and assess the revisions made to the assignment based on …

Tracking Plagiarism Electronically: First-Year Students’ Perceptions Of Academic Dishonesty And Reports Of Cheating Behaviour In The Basic Communication Course, Joseph P. Mazer, Stephen K. Hunt

Publications

This study explored how electronic submission of course material, intended to deter instances of plagiarism, influenced first-year students’ perceptions of academic dishonesty and reports of cheating behaviour in a large, multi-section basic communication course. Results reveal that electronic submission of course material results in first-year students being less likely to self-report engaging in cheating behaviours and heightens their appreciation and awareness of what constitutes academic dishonesty. Implications for classroom pedagogy, course management, and teacher training are discussed.

The Economic Situation, 2012 December, Bruce Yandle

Publications

Quarterly report on the economic situation of the United States and South Carolina.

Multi-Color Observations Of Short Grb Afterglows: 20 Events Observed Between 2007 And 2010, A. Nicuesa Guelbenzu, S. Klose, J. Greiner, D. A. Kann, T. Krühler, A. Rossi, S. Schulze, P. M. J. Afonso, J. Elliott, R Filgas, Dieter H. Hartmann, A Kupcu Yoldas, S Mcbreen, M Nardini, F Olivares E., A Rau, S Schmidl, P Schady, V Sudilovsky, A C. Updike, A Yoldas

Publications

We report on follow-up observations of 20 short-duration gamma-ray bursts (GRBs; T90 <2 >s) performed in g'r'i'z' JHKs with the Gamma-Ray Burst Optical Near-Infrared Detector (GROND) between mid-2007 and the end of 2010. This is one of the most compre-hensive data sets on GRB afterglow observations of short bursts published so far. In three cases, GROND was on target within less than 10 min after the trigger, leading to the discovery of the afterglow of GRB 081226A and its faint underlying host galaxy. In addition, GROND was able to image the optical afterglow and follow the light curve evolution in five …

Protein Nano-Object Integrator (Pronoi) For Generating Atomic Style Objects For Molecular Modeling, Nicholas Smith, Brandon Campbell, Lin Li, Chuan Li, Emil Alexov

Publications

Background

With the progress of nanotechnology, one frequently has to model biological macromolecules simultaneously with nano-objects. However, the atomic structures of the nano objects are typically not available or they are solid state entities. Because of that, the researchers have to investigate such nano systems by generating models of the nano objects in a manner that the existing software be able to carry the simulations. In addition, it should allow generating composite objects with complex shape by combining basic geometrical figures and embedding biological macromolecules within the system.

Results

Here we report the Protein Nano-Object Integrator (ProNOI) which allows for …

Family And Marital Satisfaction And The Use Of Social Network Technologies, Iryna Sharaievska

Publications

The popularity of social network sites (SNS) is increasing among all age groups. Since shared leisure is considered to be one of the key factors that contribute to the stability and quality of marriage and family and life satisfaction, the interplay between the use of SNS by family members, their leisure and their marital and family satisfaction should be examined. The objectives of this study were to: (1) Explore how the use of SNSs by family members influences and is influenced by family leisure and family satisfaction; (2) Examine how the use of SNSs by couples influences and is influenced …

Performance And Scaling Of A Novel Locomotor Structure: Adhesive Capacity Of Climbing Gobiid Fishes, Richard W. Blob, Takashi Maie, Heiko L. Schoenfuss

Publications

Many species of gobiid fishes adhere to surfaces using a sucker formed from fusion of the pelvic fins. Juveniles of many amphidromous species use this pelvic sucker to scale waterfalls during migrations to upstream habitats after an oceanic larval phase. However, adults may still use suckers to re-scale waterfalls if displaced. If attachment force is proportional to sucker area and if growth of the sucker is isometric, then increases in the forces that climbing fish must resist might outpace adhesive capacity, causing climbing performance to decline through ontogeny. To test for such trends, we measured pressure differentials and adhesive suction …

Colleges’ And Universities’ Use Of Twitter: A Content Analysis, Darren Linvill, Sara E. Mcgee, Laura K. Hicks

Publications

This study explored how colleges and universities are employing Twitter, a popular micro-blogging tool. Using Kent and Taylor's principles of dialogic communication, a content analysis was performed on individual tweets (n = 1130) from 113 colleges and universities. Tweets were coded for whether or not they met each principle of dialogical communication and why. It was found that institutions are not employing Twitter in a dialogic way and they are, instead, employing it primarily as an institutional news feed to a general audience. The implications of this finding are discussed.

Reviewed Work(S): Leonora By Elena Poniatowska, Salvador Oropesa

Publications

No abstract provided.

Reviewed Work(S): Spectacle And Topophilia. Reading Early Modern And Postmodernhispanic Cultures By David R. Castillo And Bradley J. Nelson, Salvador Oropesa

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No abstract provided.

Translating The Statistical Representation Of The Effects Of Education Interventions Into More Readily Interpretable Forms, Mark W. Lipsey, Kelly Puzio, Cathy Yun, Michael A. Hebert, Kasia Steinka-Fry, Mikel W. Cole, Megan Roberts, Karen S. Anthony, Matthew D. Busick

Publications

This paper is directed to researchers who conduct and report education intervention studies. Its purpose is to stimulate and guide them to go a step beyond reporting the statistics that emerge from their analysis of the differences between experimental groups on the respective outcome variables. With what is often very minimal additional effort, those statistical representations can be translated into forms that allow their magnitude and practical significance to be more readily understood by the practitioners, policymakers, and even other researchers who are interested in the intervention that was evaluated.

Act 388 Revisited, 2012 November, Holley Hewitt Ulbrich, Ellen Weeks Saltzman

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No abstract provided.

Path Dependence And Community Development In South Carolina, 2012 October 23, Jonathan Keisler

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No abstract provided.

Tax Exempt Property And Municipal Revenue In South Carolina, 2012 October, Jonathan Keisler, Holley Hewitt Ulbrich

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No abstract provided.

Radiation From Accelerated Particles In Relativistic Jets With Shocks, Shear-Flow, And Reconnection, K.-I. Nishikawa, P. Hardee, Y. Mizuno, I. Dutan, B. Zhang, M. Medvedev, E. J. Chor, K. W. Min, J. Niemiec, Y Mizuno, A Nordlund, J T. Frederiksen, H Sol, M Pohl, Dieter H. Hartmann

Publications

We have investigated particle acceleration and shock structure associated with an unmagnetized rel-ativistic jet propagating into an unmagnetized plasma for electron-positron and electron-ion plasmas. Strong magnetic fields generated in the trailing jet shock lead to transverse deflection and acceleration of the electrons. We have self-consistently calculated the radiation from the electrons accelerated in the turbulent magnetic fields for different jet Lorentz factors. We find that the synthetic spectra depend on the bulk Lorentz factor of the jet, the jet temperature, and the strength of the magnetic fields generated in the shock. We have investigated the generation of magnetic fields associated …

The Effect Of Increasing Salinity And Forest Mortality On Soil Nitrogen And Phosphorus Mineralization In Tidal Freshwater Forested Wetlands, William Conner, Gregory Noe, B Graeme Lockaby, Ken Krauss

Publications

Tidal freshwater wetlands are sensitive to sea level rise and increased salinity, although little information is known about the impact of salinification on nutrient biogeochemistry in tidal freshwater forested wetlands. We quantified soil nitrogen (N) and phosphorus (P) mineralization using seasonal in situincubations of modified resin cores along spatial gradients of chronic salinification (from continuously freshwater tidal forest to salt impacted tidal forest to oligohaline marsh) and in hummocks and hollows of the continuously freshwater tidal forest along the blackwater Waccamaw River and alluvial Savannah River. Salinification increased rates of net N and P mineralization fluxes and turnover in tidal …

An Infrastructure To Support Data Integration And Curation For Higher Educational Research, Linh B. Ngo, Amy W. Apon, Pengfei Xuan, Kimberley Ferguson, Christin Marshall, John Mccann, Yueli Zheng

Publications

The recent challenges for higher education call for research that can offer a comprehensive understanding about the performance and efficiency of higher education institutions in their three primary missions: research, education, and service. In other for this to happen, it is necessary for researchers to have access to a multitude of data sources.However, due to the nature of their academic training, many higher education practitioners do not have access to expertise in working with different data sources. In this work, we describe a design and implementation for an infrastructure that will bring together the tools and the data to provide …

The Genus Plectrocnemia Stephens In China (Trichoptera, Polycentropodidae), Hua Zhong, Lian-Fang Yang, John C. Morse

Publications

Currently, 21 species of the genus Plectrocnemia are known from China. Examination of material collected from 13 provinces of China from 1990–2005 has revealed 9 new species and 3 new records of this genus, bringing the number of Chinese Plectrocnemia species to 33. Newly described species include: P. monacanthus sp. nov., P. huangi sp. nov., P. maoerensis sp. nov., P. pectinata sp. nov., P. fanjingensis sp. nov., P. platilobus sp. nov., P. paragryphalis sp. nov., P. bifoliolata sp. nov., and P. wuyiensis sp. nov. Two species, Plectrocnemia sinualis Wang & Yang and P. uncata Wang & Yang are synonymized with …

Integrated Traffic And Communication Performance Evaluation Of An Intelligent Vehicle Infrastructure Integration (Vii) System For Online Travel Time Prediction, Yongchang Ma, Mashrur Chowdhury, Adel Sadek, Mansoureh Jeihani

Publications

This paper presents a framework for online highway travel time prediction using traffic measurements that are likely to be available from Vehicle Infrastructure Integration (VII) systems, in which vehicle and infrastructure devices communicate to improve mobility and safety. In the proposed intelligent VII system, two artificial intelligence (AI) paradigms, namely Artificial Neural Networks (ANN) and Support Vector Regression (SVR), are used to determine future travel time based on such information as current travel time, VII-enabled vehicles’ flow and density. The development and performance evaluation of the VII-ANN and VII-SVR frameworks, in both of the traffic and communications domains, were conducted, …

The Impact Of Clemson University On The State Of South Carolina, 2012 September, Robert T. Carey

Publications

Condensed report

The Impact Of Clemson University, 2012 September, Robert T. Carey

Publications

No abstract provided.

The Economic Situation, 2012 September, Bruce Yandle

Publications

Quarterly report on the economic situation of the United States and South Carolina.

A Deep Search For Host Galaxies Of Grbs With No Detected Optical Afterglow, A. Rossi, S. Klose, P. Ferrero, J. Greiner, L. A. Arnold, E. Gonslaves, Dieter H. Hartmann, A. C. Updike, D. A. Kann, T. Krühler

Publications

Context. Gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) can provide information about star formation at high redshifts. Even in the absence of a bright optical/near-infrared/radio afterglow, the high detection rate of X-ray afterglows by Swift/XRT and its localization precision of 2–3 arcsec facilitates the identification and the study of GRB host galaxies. Aims. We focus on the search for the host galaxies of 17 bursts with arcsec-sized XRT error circles but no detected long-wavelength afterglow, in spite of their deep and rapid follow-up observations. Three of these events can also be classified as truly dark bursts, i.e., the observed upper limit on the optical …

Highly Efficient And Exact Method For Parallelization Of Grid-Based Algorithms And Its Implementation In Delphi, Chuan Li, Lin Li, Jie Zhang, Emil Alexov

Publications

The Gauss–Seidel (GS) method is a standard iterative numerical method widely used to solve a system of equations and, in general, is more efficient comparing to other iterative methods, such as the Jacobi method. However, standard implementation of the GS method restricts its utilization in parallel computing due to its requirement of using updated neighboring values (i.e., in current iteration) as soon as they are available. Here, we report an efficient and exact (not requiring assumptions) method to parallelize iterations and to reduce the computational time as a linear/nearly linear function of the number of processes or computing units. In …

A Genome-Wide Over-Expression Screen Identifies Genes Involved In Phagocytosis In The Human Protozoan Parasite, Entamoeba Histolytica, Ada V. King, Brenda H. Welter, Amrita B. Koushik, Lindsay N. Gordon, Lesly A. Temesvari

Publications

Functional genomics and forward genetics seek to assign function to all known genes in a genome. Entamoeba histolytica is a protozoan parasite for which forward genetics approaches have not been extensively applied. It is the causative agent of amoebic dysentery and liver abscess, and infection is prevalent in developing countries that cannot prevent its fecal-oral spread. It is responsible for considerable global morbidity and mortality. Given that the E. histolytica genome has been sequenced, it should be possible to apply genomic approaches to discover gene function. We used a genome-wide over-expression screen to uncover genes regulating an important virulence function …

On The Cyclically Fully Commutative Elements Of Coxeter Groups, T. Boothby, J. Burket, M. Eichwald, D. C. Ernst, R. M. Green, Matthew Macauley

Publications

Let W be an arbitrary Coxeter group. If two elements have expressions that are cyclic shifts of each other (as words), then they are conjugate (as group elements) in W. We say that w is cyclically fully commutative (CFC) if every cyclic shift of any reduced expression for w is fully commutative (i.e., avoids long braid relations). These generalize Coxeter elements in that their reduced expressions can be described combinatorially by acyclic directed graphs, and cyclically shifting corresponds to source-to-sink conversions. In this paper, we explore the combinatorics of the CFC elements and enumerate them in all Coxeter groups. …

A Revision Of The Genus Mecistostethus Marseul (Histeridae, Histerinae, Exosternini), Michael S. Caterino, Alexey K. Tishechkin, Nicolas Degallier

Publications

We revise the genus Mecistostethus Marseul, sinking the monotypic genus Tarsilister Bruch as a junior synonym. Mecistostethus contains six valid species: M. pilifer Marseul, M. loretoensis (Bruch), comb. n., M. seagorum sp. n., M. carltoni sp. n., M. marseuli sp. n., and M. flechtmanni sp. n. The few existing records show the genus to be widespread in tropical and subtropical South America, from northern Argentina to western Amazonian Ecuador and French Guiana. Only a single host record associates one species with the ant
Pachycondyla striata Smith (Formicidae: Ponerinae), but it is possible that related ants host all the species.

The Gas/Dust Ratio Of Circumstellar Disks: Testing Models Of Planetesimal Formation, David Horne, Erika Gibb, Terrence W. Rettig, Sean D. Brittain, David Tilley, Dinshaw Balsara

Publications

We present high-resolution, near-infrared NIRSPEC observations of CO absorption toward six class II T Tauri stars: AA Tau, DG Tau, IQ Tau, RY Tau, CW Tau, and Haro 6–5b. 12CO overtone absorption lines originating from the circumstellar disk of each object were used to calculate line-of-sight gas column densities toward each source. We measured the gas/dust ratio as a function of disk inclination, utilizing measured visual extinctions and inclinations for each star. The majority of our sources show further evidence for a correlation between the gas/dust columndensity ratio and disk inclination similar to that found by Rettig et al.

Elastic Properties Of The Zintl Ferromagnet Yb14mnsb11, Sriparna Bhattacharya, D C. Marinescu, James R. Morris, Ivan A. Sergienko, Brian Sales, David Madrus, Veerle Keppens

Publications

We report measurements of the elastic moduli as a function of temperature (5–300) K and magnetic field (0–2 T) for the Zintl ferromagnet Yb14MnSb11, which is believed to be a rare example of an underscreened Kondo lattice. The elastic moduli measured below the Curie temperature in this complex ferromagnet exhibit unusual lattice stiffening that is independent of the magnetic field and can be adequately modeled using the Landau theory.

Model Of A Mechanical Clock Escapement, John Wagner, David Moline, Eugene Vold

Publications

The mechanical tower clock originated in Europe during the 14th century to sound hourly bells and later display hands on a dial. An important innovation was the escapement mechanism, which converts stored energy into oscillatory motion for fixed time intervals through the pendulum swing. Previous work has modeled the escapement mechanism in terms of inelastic and elastic collisions. We derive and experimentally verify a theoretical model in terms of impulsive differential equations for the Graham escapement mechanism in a Seth Thomas tower clock. The model offers insight into the clock’s mechanical behavior and the functionality of the deadbeat escapement mechanism.