Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Media Coverage Of Anthropogenic Climate Change: Analysis Of Coverage, Issues, And Implications For Public Engagement And Government Policy, Renee Farmer

Senior Honors Theses

Media coverage of climate change is responsible for shaping both public understanding and government policies regarding the environment. The public relies on the media to translate the oftentimes complex terminology, processes, and implications of environmental research and findings. Unfortunately, miscommunication frequently occurs as the media seek to bridge this knowledge gap, with implications including hostile public sentiment, failure to take necessary action, and ineffective or harmful governmental policies. This thesis will provide an overview of how the media cover climate change, including analyses of both poor and successful coverage of issues, identification of risks and reoccurring problems present in media …

Tweet-To-Act: Towards Tweet-Mining Framework For Extracting Terrorist Attack-Related Information And Reporting, Farkhund Iqbal, Rabia Batool, Benjamin C. M. Fung, Saiqa Aleem, Ahmed Abbasi, Abdul Rehman Javed

All Works

The widespread popularity of social networking is leading to the adoption of Twitter as an information dissemination tool. Existing research has shown that information dissemination over Twitter has a much broader reach than traditional media and can be used for effective post-incident measures. People use informal language on Twitter, including acronyms, misspelled words, synonyms, transliteration, and ambiguous terms. This makes incident-related information extraction a non-trivial task. However, this information can be valuable for public safety organizations that need to respond in an emergency. This paper proposes an early event-related information extraction and reporting framework that monitors Twitter streams, synthesizes event-specific …

Toward Tweet-Mining Framework For Extracting Terrorist Attack-Related Information And Reporting, Farkhund Iqbal, Rabia Batool, Benjamin C. M. Fung, Saiqa Aleem, Ahmed Abbasi, Abdul Rehman Javed

All Works

The widespread popularity of social networking is leading to the adoption of Twitter as an information dissemination tool. Existing research has shown that information dissemination over Twitter has a much broader reach than traditional media and can be used for effective post-incident measures. People use informal language on Twitter, including acronyms, misspelled words, synonyms, transliteration, and ambiguous terms. This makes incident-related information extraction a non-trivial task. However, this information can be valuable for public safety organizations that need to respond in an emergency. This paper proposes an early event-related information extraction and reporting framework that monitors Twitter streams synthesizes event-specific …

Get The News Out Loudly And Quickly: Modeling The Influence Of The Media On Limiting Infectious Disease, Anna Mummert, Howard Weiss

Mathematics Faculty Research

During outbreaks of infectious diseases with high morbidity and mortality, individuals closely follow media reports of the outbreak. Many will attempt to minimize contacts with other individuals in order to protect themselves from infection and possibly death. This process is called social distancing. Social distancing strategies include restricting socializing and travel, and using barrier protections. We use modeling to show that for short-term outbreaks, social distancing can have a large influence on reducing outbreak morbidity and mortality. In particular, public health agencies working together with the media can significantly reduce the severity of an outbreak by providing timely accounts of …

Complications Of The Climate Change Narrative Within The Lives Of Climate Refugees, Raphaella Mascia

Department of Environmental Studies Student Scholarship

With projections of rapidly increasing numbers of climate refugees in the next decades, the discourse surrounding climate refugees becomes ever more pertinent within the field of sustainable development and the public sphere. I offer an alternative analysis of the processes which surround “knowing” and “defining” climate refugees by employing an interpretive framework which disseminates the term “narrative” according to Jean François Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. In the discourse surrounding climate refugees, two main narratives interact with each other: the dominant climate change narrative and the individual narratives of climate refugees themselves. I contend that the …

College Of Liberal Arts And Sciences_Covid-19 Course Content, Kristin Vekasi, Frederic Rondeau, Marcella Sorg, Derek Michaud, Ayesha Miller, Kirsten Jacobson, Lillian Herakova, Mark Brewer

College of Liberal Arts and Sciences

List of COVID-19 related course content in the University of Maine's College of Liberal Arts and Sciences during the 2020 Spring Semester. Includes descriptions from:

• Kristin Vekasi, Associate Professor, Political Science for POS 349: Politics of Media and Censorship;
• Frederic Rondeau, Associate Professor, Modern Languages and Classics for Introduction to French Classics Novels of the XX-XXI century;
• Marcella Sorg (Research Professor, Department of Anthropology, Climate Change Institute, and Margaret Chase Smith Policy Center for ANT 260: Forensic Anthropology;
• Derek Michaud, Lecturer, Philosophy; Coordinator of Religious Studies and Judaic Studies for PHI 105: Introduction to Religious Studies and PHI 100: Contemporary …

Law Library Blog (August 2019): Legal Beagle's Blog Archive, Roger Williams University School Of Law

Law Library Newsletters/Blog

No abstract provided.

El Poder Del Sonido: La Radio Comunitaria En La Resistencia Contra Los Proyectos Extractivistas En La Patagonia / The Power Of Sound: Community Radio In Resistance Against Extractivist Projects In Patagonia, Dora Segall

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

Desde finales de la última dictadura militar, la radio comunitaria fue utilizada por las personas cuyas voces no se representaban en los medios masivos de comunicación (Gerbaldo 2012). A fines de la década de 1980, surgieron nuevos medios populares para expresar las opiniones de quienes habían sido silenciados. Este desarrollo ha continuado hasta hoy en día. En junio de 2017 se registraron 416 estaciones de radio sin fines de lucro en Argentina (Galay 2017).

Siendo medio de comunicación alternativo utilizado en todo el país, la radio comunitaria funciona con una gestión horizontal o democrática. La Ley de Servicios de Comunicación …

Sensory Seduction And Narrative Pull, Nina Lyons, Matt Smith, Hugh Mccabe

Conference papers

User experience design is a process that has been defined, developed and refined over the last few decades. It is a process of shaping a user's movements through a website or mobile application. It is user-focussed, prioritising utility, ease-of-use and efficiency. It is widely used and has helped advance the way in which users interact with websites and mobile applications, making it far less frustrating. User experience design is a key element in how the internet and mobile technology have become ubiquitous in our daily lives. Given this success, it would seem that continuing to use this process for new …

Measuring Presence: Hypothetical Quantitative Framework, Krzysztof Szczurowski, Matt Smith

Conference papers

Virtual Reality Head - Mounted Display (HMD) manufacturers claim that consumer electronics can finally deliver a high degree of presence in virtual and remote environments. Certainly, current consumer-grade HMD systems offer rich and coherent mediated experiences of such environments. However, the very concept of presence is still a subject of debate, and researchers' investigation of the phenomenon of `presence' is based primarily on qualitative (i.e. questionnaire-based) assessments. Some researchers attempted to develop real-time, quantitative methods to facilitate more objective investigation of presence in mediated environments. Most such methodologies are derived from attempts to correlate presence with cardiovascular and electrodermal activity …

Investigating The Accuracy Of Georeferenced Social Media Data For Flood Mapping: The Petajakarta.Org Case Study, Robert Ighodaro Ogie, Hugh I. Forehead

SMART Infrastructure Facility - Papers

Georeferenced social media data are gaining increased application in creating near real-time flood maps needed to improve situational awareness in data-starved regions. However, there is growing concern that the georeferenced locations of flood-related social media contents do not always correspond to the actual locations of the flooding event. But to what extent is this true? Without this knowledge, it is difficult to ascertain the accuracy of flood maps created using georeferenced social media contents. This study aims to improve understanding of the extent to which georeferenced locations of social media flood reports deviate from the actual locations of floods. The …

Can Instagram Posts Help Characterize Urban Micro-Events?, Kasthuri Jayarajah, Archan Misra

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Social media content, from platforms such as Twitter and Foursquare, has enabled an exciting new field of social sensing, where participatory content generated by users has been used to identify unexpected emerging or trending events. In contrast to such text-based channels, we focus on image-sharing social applications (specifically Instagram), and investigate how such urban social sensing can leverage upon the additional multi-modal, multimedia content. Given the significantly higher fraction of geotagged content on Instagram, we aim to use such channels to go beyond identification of long-lived events (e.g., a marathon) to achieve finer-grained characterization of multiple micro-events (e.g., a person …

Social Media Analysis On Evaluating Organizational Performance: A Railway Service Management, Jie Yang, Ahm Mehbub Anwar

SMART Infrastructure Facility - Papers

The last decade has witnessed the dramatic expansion of online social media at the global level. It is widely believed that the influence of social media is of particular importance for public and private organisations. Unfortunately, there is very limited and anecdotal evidence to show the durable influence of social media on various components and functions within organisations. To this end, this study examines the impact of social media, particularly taking the railway services in New South Wales (NSW), Australia and the Twitter platform as an illustrative example. Topic modelling and sentiment analysis techniques are employed to analyse collected tweets …

Flooding In The Media, Jeremy Wheeler

July 24, 2015: Communicating Frequent Flooding

No abstract provided.

Slides: New Era Of Water Banking And Refined "Water Accounting", Bonnie Colby

Innovations in Managing Western Water: New Approaches for Balancing Environmental, Social and Economic Outcomes (Martz Summer Conference, June 11-12)

Presenter: Professor Bonnie Colby, Departments of Agricultural and Resource Economics and Hydrology and Water Resources, University of Arizona

23 slides

Design, Programming, And User-Experience, Kaila G. Manca

Honors Scholar Theses

This thesis is a culmination of my individualized major in Human-Computer Interaction. As such, it showcases my knowledge of design, computer engineering, user-experience research, and puts into practice my background in psychology, com- munications, and neuroscience.

I provided full-service design and development for a web application to be used by the Digital Media and Design Department and their students.This process involved several iterations of user-experience research, testing, concepting, branding and strategy, ideation, and design. It lead to two products.

The first product is full-scale development and optimization of the web appli- cation.The web application adheres to best practices. It was …

Applications Of Scanning Electrochemical Microscopy (Secm) For Local Characterization Of Az31 Surface During Corrosion In A Buffered Media, Sina S. Jamali, Simon E. Moulton, Dennis E. Tallman, Maria Forsyth, Jan Weber, Gordon G. Wallace

Australian Institute for Innovative Materials - Papers

Different modes of scanning electrochemical mapping (SECM) such as surface generation/tip collection (SG/TC), amperometry, AC-SECM and potentiometry were employed to characterize the active/passive domains, hydrogen gas (H2) evolution and local pH on a corroding surface of AZ31 in simulated biological fluid (SBF). It was found that the main domains of H2 evolution are associated with lower insulating properties of the surface as well as higher local pH. The near surface pH was found to be highly alkaline indicating that, even in a buffered solution such as SBF, the local pH on a corroding AZ31 surface can be significantly different to …

Solitary Waves And Their Stability In Colloidal Media: Semi-Analytical Solutions, Timothy R. Marchant, N F. Smyth

Faculty of Informatics - Papers (Archive)

Spatial solitary waves in colloidal suspensions of spherical dielectric nanopartides are considered. The interaction of the nanoparticles is modelled as a hard-sphere gas, with the Carnahan-Starling formula used for the gas compressibility. Semi-analytical solutions, for both one and two spatial dimensions, arc derived using an averaged Lagrangian and suitable trial functions for the solitary waves. Power versus propagation constant curves and neutral stability curves are obtained for both cases, which illustrate that multiple solution branches occur for both the one and two dimensional geometries. For the one-dimensional case it is found that three solution branches (with a bistable regime) occur. …

Fishing For Animal Rights In The Cove: A Holistic Approach To Animal Advocacy Documentaries, Carrie Packwood Freeman

Communication Faculty Publications

The Oscar-winning 2009 documentary The Cove serves as a thrilling and poignant advocacy tool promoting activism to save free-roaming dolphins off the coast of Japan from kidnapping, enslavement in marine parks, and slaughter for meat. This essay evaluates the ethical and social justice implications of The Cove not just for dolphins but for the animal rights movement as a whole, particularly in terms of how it could challenge the ethicality of humans killing any nonhuman animals for food. Strategic media recommendations are made for how animal protection advocates could better deconstruct the human/animal dualism that is at the root of …

Approximate Techniques For Dispersive Shock Waves In Nonlinear Media, Timothy R. Marchant, Noel F. Smyth

Australian Institute for Innovative Materials - Papers

Many optical and other nonlinear media are governed by dispersive, or diffractive, wave equations, for which initial jump discontinuities are resolved into a dispersive shock wave. The dispersive shock wave smooths the initial discontinuity and is a modulated wavetrain consisting of solitary waves at its leading edge and linear waves at its trailing edge. For integrable equations the dispersive shock wave solution can be found using Whitham modulation theory. For nonlinear wave equations which are hyperbolic outside the dispersive shock region, the amplitudes of the solitary waves at the leading edge and the linear waves at the trailing edge of …

Tweets And Votes: A Study Of The 2011 Singapore General Election, Marko M. Skoric, Nathaniel D. Poor, Palakorn Achananuparp, Ee Peng Lim, Jing Jiang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This study focuses on the uses of Twitter during the elections, examining whether the messages posted online are reflective of the climate of public opinion. Using Twitter data obtained during the official campaign period of the 2011 Singapore General Election, we test the predictive power of tweets in forecasting the election results. In line with some previous studies, we find that during the elections the Twitter sphere represents a rich source of data for gauging public opinion and that the frequency of tweets mentioning names of political parties, political candidates and contested constituencies could be used to make predictions about …

Terrorism In Australia: A Psychometric Study Into The Western Australian Public Perception Of Terrorism, Richard Sargent, David J. Brooks

Australian Security and Intelligence Conference

Terrorism is not a new concept, as historically terrorist organisations have used the threat of violence or actual violence to generate fear in individuals, organisations and governments alike. Fear is a weapon and is used to gain political, ideological or religious objectives. Past terrorist attacks have raised concerns around the world, as governments ensured that their anti-terrorism security strategies are adequate. Domestically, Australia upgraded its capacity to respond to terrorism events through security enhancements across many areas and with new initiatives such as the 2002 public counter terrorism campaign. Nevertheless, there has been restricted research into how terrorist events have …

Global Warming: Sunny Side Up, Blake Adams

The First-Year Papers (2010 - present)

No abstract provided.

Media, Government And Manipulation: The Cases Of The Two Gulf Wars, William Hutchinson

Australian Information Warfare and Security Conference

This paper explores the bias and manipulation of the Western mass media during the Gulf wars of 1991 and 2003. The tactics of compliance and the ethics of the press and journalists are examined. The need for a pluralist press is extolled.

Modeling The Permittivity Of Two-Phase Media Containing Monodisperse Spheres: Effects Of Microstructure And Multiple Scattering, Timothy E. Doyle, David A. Robinson, Scott B. Jones, Keith H. Warnick, Brent L. Carruth

Plants, Soils, and Climate Faculty Publications

A numerical modeling approach was developed to predict the dielectric properties of heterogeneous particulate materials with arbitrary microstructures. To test the method, simulation and experimental data were acquired for the effective permittivities of various glass sphere suspensions. Both ordered lattices and random microstructures of up to 3600 spheres were modeled for volume fractions of 0.025–0.60. The electric fields in the suspensions were computed using an iterative multipole method that included multiple-scattering effects. The effective permittivities were obtained by averaging the electric field and electric displacement over a representative volume. Frequency spectra, electric field images, and single-scattering results (i.e., no particle-particle …

Terrorism As Opiniotainment: Perceptions Warriors And The Public Battlefield, Luke Howie

Australian Information Warfare and Security Conference

Terrorism continues to have a significant impact on the lives of Australians. Whilst Australian cities remain untargeted during this present wave of terrorism, many Australians perceive the threat to be significant. Terrorism is offered for consumption daily in the news media and many Australians have seen the images of terrorism. In addition to television images, media consumers have been inundated with terrorism reporting on talkback radio, in feature films, and in newspapers. What impact does the perceptions wars on terrorism have on Australian society? Are the public more or less knowledgeable because of public debate? These are questions that need …

Global Reach: Terrorists And The Internet, Simon O'Rourke

Australian Information Warfare and Security Conference

The use of the Internet by terrorists appears to diverge into two distinct modes neither of which is mutually exclusive. The first aligns to the view that terrorists will use the Internet as a platform to launch cyber attacks against critical infrastructure nodes as well as key government and private sector networks. This paper discusses the alternate mode that being the primary use of the Internet by terrorists will be to recruit, train, communicate and gain information about potential targets by conducting virtual reconnaissance. It will examine the nexus between the virtual world and the physical threat that is manifested …

Imagining King Street In The Gay/Lesbian Media, Andrew W. Gorman-Murray

Faculty of Science - Papers (Archive)

The identities of places do not exist a priori, but are derived from various representations constructed through social and cultural processes. The media is a key producer and disseminator of place images and identities in contemporary society. This paper examines the way the gay/lesbian media have imagined the King Street precinct, one of Sydney’s ostensible gay/lesbian localities, between 2003 and 2005. Through textual analyses of these media commentaries, I argue that King Street is often represented in comparison with Sydney’s other notable gay/lesbian space, the Oxford Street precinct. I find, moreover, that this imagined binary relationship is shifting and changing: …

Slides: Wisconsin County Forests, Neil Paulson

Community-Owned Forests: Possibilities, Experiences, and Lessons Learned (June 16-19)

Presenter: Neil Paulson, Bayfield County Forest, WI

25 slides

Cross Media Promotion Of The Internet In Television Commercials, Steven M. Edwards, Carrie La Ferle

Temerlin Advertising Institute Research

Increasing presence of internet addresses across traditional media spurred the current study. Specifically, the study examined the cross media promotion of website addresses in television commercials to determine if and when they were being used, and by whom? For comparison purposes, other formsof direct response channels were also measured. A clearer understanding of the practice of promoting web sites in television commercials was garnered by examining website addresses for their size, length, positioning, frequency, product categoy representation, and other important attributes. The findings provide an initial base from which future growth and style of web site advertising in traditional media …