Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Russia Today, Cyberterrorists Tomorrow: U.S. Failure To Prepare Democracy For Cyberspace, Jonathan F. Lancelot

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

This paper is designed to expose vulnerabilities within the US electoral system, the use of cyberspace to exploit weaknesses within the information assurance strategies of the democratic and republican party organizations, and deficiencies within the social media communications and voting machine exploits. A brief history of discriminatory practices in voting rights and voting access will be set as the foundation for the argument that the system is vulnerable in the cyber age, and the need for reform at the local, state and national levels will be emphasized. The possibility of a foreign nation-state influencing the outcome of an election by …

Find, Process, And Share: An Optimal Control In The Vidale-Wolfe Marketing Model, Michael C. Barg

CODEE Journal

The Vidale-Wolfe marketing model is a first-order, linear, non-homogeneous ordinary differential equation (ODE) where the forcing term is proportional to advertising expenditure. With an initial response in sales as the initial condition, the solution of the initial value problem is straightforward for a first undergraduate ODE course. The model serves as an excellent example of many relevant topics for those students whose interests lie in economics, finance, or marketing. Its inclusion in the curriculum is particularly rewarding at an institution without a physics program. The model is not new, but it was novel to us when a group of students …

Considering The Non-Programming Geographer's Perspective When Designing Extracurricular Introductory Computer Programming Workshops, Thomas R Etherington

Journal of Spatial Information Science

Computer programming is becoming an increasingly important scientific skill, but geographers are not necessarily receiving this training as part of their formal education. While there are efforts to promote and support extracurricular introductory computer programming workshops, there remain questions about how best to deliver these workshops. Therefore, as part of a recent introductory programming extracurricular workshop I organized for non-programing geographers, I tried to understand more about their perceptions of computer programming. I identify that one of the most important aspects for geographers to learn to computer program is to have training that is domain specific to ensure that the …

Towards Harmonizing Property Measurement Standards, Abdullah Kara, Volkan Çağdaş, Ümit Işıkdağ, Bülent Onur Turan

Journal of Spatial Information Science

Area and volume values of buildings and building parts have been used in many applications including taxation, valuation and land use planning. Many countries maintain a national standard for representing the measurements of floor areas in buildings. The national standards generally use similar basis for measuring building floor areas, in fact, areas specified in national standards often have semantic differences. Therefore, a number of international standards have been developed for harmonizing floor area measurements; however, they also have differences. This study aims at harmonizing the floor areas defined in the international property measurement standards by revealing the semantic relations between …

Bridging Space, Time, And Semantics In Giscience, Margarita Kokla, Eric Guilbert, Mir Abolfazl Mostafavi

Journal of Spatial Information Science

No abstract provided.

Hyper-Local Geographically Weighted Regression: Extending Gwr Through Local Model Selection And Local Bandwidth Optimization, Alexis Comber, Yunqiang Wang, Yihe Lü, Xingchang Zhang, Paul Harris

Journal of Spatial Information Science

Geographically weighted regression (GWR) is an inherently exploratory technique for examining process non-stationarity in data relationships. This paper develops and applies a hyper-local GWR which extends such investigations further. The hyper-local GWR simultaneously optimizes both local model selection (which covariates to include in each local regression) and local kernel bandwidth specification (how much data should be included locally). These are evaluated using a measure of model fit. The hyper-local GWR approach evaluates different kernel bandwidths at each location and selects the most parsimonious local regression model. By allowing models and bandwidths to vary locally, this approach extends and refines the …

Georeferencing Places From Collective Human Descriptions Using Place Graphs, Hao Chen, Stephan Winter, Maria Vasardani

Journal of Spatial Information Science

Place descriptions in everyday communication or in online text provide a rich source of spatial knowledge about places. Such descriptions typically consist of references to places and spatial relationships between them. An important step to utilize such knowledge in information systems is georeferencing the referred places. Beside place name disambiguation, another challenge is that a significant proportion of place references in such descriptions are not official place names indexed by gazetteers, thus cannot be resolved easily. This paper presents a novel approach for georeferencing places from collective descriptions using place graphs, regardless of whether they are referred to by gazetteered …

Towards Place-Based Exploration Of Instagram: Using Co-Design To Develop An Interdisciplinary Geovisualization Prototype, Catherine Emma Jones, Daniele Guido, Marta Severo

Journal of Spatial Information Science

An abundance of geographic information is hidden within texts and multimedia objects that has the potential to enrich our knowledge about the relationship between people and places. One such example is the geographic information embedded within user-generated content collected and curated by the social media giants. Such geographic data can be encoded either explicitly as geotags or implicitly as geographical references expressed as texts that comprise part of a title or image caption. To use such data for knowledge building there is a need for new mapping interfaces. These interfaces should support both data integration and visualization, and geographical exploration …

Facilitating Pre-Service Teachers To Engage Emergent Bilinguals In Productive Struggle, Benjamin T. Dickey, Jim Ewing, Melissa Caruso, Emily D. Fulmer

Journal of Multicultural Affairs

This study utilized a multiple case study with qualitative research to examine how Pre-service teachers (PSTs) might engage Emergent Bilinguals (EBs) in productive struggle—grappling to solve problems (Warshauer, 2015). The researchers created a rubric based on Warshauer’s (2015) case study to record the types of questions PSTs asked as they tutored fourth grade EBs. Warshauer (2015) claimed PSTs should allow students more wait time and ask questions. She referred to such questions as affordance and probing guidance, which facilitates productive struggle. In order to discover more about the PSTs’ thinking, the researchers interviewed the PSTs before and after their first, …

Inequality, Rubber, And Thermodynamics In Indonesia, Ernest M. Oleksy

The Downtown Review

Intersectionality has led the charge in ensuring that workplace justice is assured to all people, irrespective of their identities. While intersectionality is a useful theory for explaining inequality, what must not be understated is the contributions that postcolonialism and the blue-collar working identity can have on harsh working conditions. Particularly, miners in Indonesia have had to work in very hostile environments where they are at-risk for sulfur poisoning as they mine for materials to vulcanize rubber. This article serves two purposes. The first is to call attention to how place can help explain the differential experiences of miners in the …

An Examination Of The Death Penalty, Alexandra N. Kremer

The Downtown Review

The death penalty, or capital punishment, is the use of execution through hanging, beheading, drowning, gas chambers, lethal injection, and electrocution among others in response to a crime. This has spurred much debate on whether it should be used for reasons such as ethics, revenge, economics, effectiveness as a deterrent, and constitutionality. Capital punishment has roots that date back to the 18^th century B.C., but, as of 2016, has been abolished in law or practice by more than two thirds of the world’s countries and several states within the United States. Here, the arguments for and against the death …

Elaia 2018, Stephen Case

ELAIA

Volume 1

Over the years, the Program has continued to grow and flourish, and the depth of its research continues to increase. This inaugural journal represents the fruits of that development, containing capstone research projects from the 2018 Honors Program senior class and their faculty mentors. The Table of Contents is diverse, and in that way it is a crystal clear reflection of our program’s community of scholars.

I, along with the members of the Honors Council, am gratified by the work of each student and faculty mentor printed within these pages. Congratulations, everyone!

- Stephen Lowe, Honors Program Director

A Proficient Two-Stage Stratified Randomized Response Strategy, Tanveer A. Tarray, Housila P. Singh

Journal of Modern Applied Statistical Methods

A stratified randomized response model based on R. Singh, Singh, Mangat, and Tracy (1995) improved two-stage randomized response strategy is proposed. It has an optimal allocation and large gain in precision. Conditions are obtained under which the proposed model is more efficient than R. Singh et al. (1995) and H. P. Singh and Tarray (2015) models. Numerical illustrations are also given in support of the present study.

Extended Method For Several Dichotomous Covariates To Estimate The Instantaneous Risk Function Of The Aalen Additive Model, Luciane Teixeira Passos Giarola, Mario Javier Ferrua Vivanco, Marcelo Angelo Cirillo, Fortunato Silva Menezes

Journal of Modern Applied Statistical Methods

The instantaneous risk function of Aalen’s model is estimated considering dichotomous covariates, using parametric accumulated risk functions to smooth cumulative risk of Aalen by grouping the individuals into sets named parcels. This methodology can be used for data with dichotomous covariates.

Simple Unbalanced Ranked Set Sampling For Mean Estimation Of Response Variable Of Developmental Programs, Girish Chandra, Dinesh S. Bhoj, Rajiv Pandey

Journal of Modern Applied Statistical Methods

An unbalanced ranked set sampling (RSS) procedure on the skewed survey variable is proposed to estimate the population mean of a response variable from the area of developmental programs which are generally implemented under different phases. It is based on the unbalanced RSS under linear impacts of the program and is compared with the estimators based on simple random sampling (SRS) and balanced RSS. It is shown that the relative precision of the proposed estimator is higher than those of the estimators based on SRS and balanced RSS for three chosen skewed distributions of survey variables.

Minerva 2018, The Honors College

Minerva

This issue of Minerva includes an article on the Honors Endeavor by recently retired faculty member, David Gross; an adaptation of Isaac Record's 2018 Distinguished Honors Graduate lecture; an article on 2018 Honors Read Just Mercy; and a wonderful farewell to beloved Honors College Administrative Specialist, Deb Small. Other highlights include a reflection by CLAS-Honors preceptor of philosophy, Hao Hong; and a look into 2018-2019 student thesis research.

Induced Hesitant 2-Tuple Linguistic Aggregation Operators With Application In Group Decision Making, Tabasam Rashid, Ismat Beg, Raja N. Jamil

Applications and Applied Mathematics: An International Journal (AAM)

In this article, hesitant 2-tuple linguistic arguments are used to evaluate the group decision making problems which have inter dependent or inter active attributes. Operational laws are developed for hesitant 2-tuple linguistic elements and based on these operational laws hesitant 2- tuple weighted averaging operator and generalized hesitant 2- tuple averaging operator are proposed. Combining Choquet integral with hesitant 2-tuple linguistic information, some new aggregation operators are defined, including the hesitant 2-tuple correlated averaging operator, the hesitant 2-tuple correlated geometric operator and the generalized hesitant 2-tuple correlated averaging operator. These proposed operators successfully manage the correlations among the elements. After …

The Impact Of Sample Size In Cross-Classified Multiple Membership Multilevel Models, Hyewon Chung, Jiseon Kim, Ryoungsun Park, Hyeonjeong Jean

Journal of Modern Applied Statistical Methods

A simulation study was conducted to examine parameter recovery in a cross-classified multiple membership multilevel model. No substantial relative bias was identified for the fixed effect or level-one variance component estimates. However, the level-two cross-classification multiple membership factor variance components were substantially biased with relatively fewer groups.

Environmental Governance And The Global South, Jeffrey J. Minneti

William & Mary Environmental Law and Policy Review

Over the last several decades, efforts to regulate the environment through traditional public law at national and international levels have stalled. In contrast, private environmental governance has flourished as nongovernmental entities have engaged in standard setting and assessment practices traditionally left to public government. This Article observes that while private governance of producers’ environmental product claims has grown tremendously in recent years, the vast majority of the governance originates in the global North and thrusts the global North’s economic and environmental agenda into the global South. In light of recent empirical studies of the effectiveness of such governance, the Article …

An Examination Of The Need For Campaign Fianance Reform Through The Lens Of The United States Treaty Clause And Environmental Protection Treaties, Jordan Smith

William & Mary Environmental Law and Policy Review

The United States’ federal election system is constantly the focus of debate, including components from voting mechanisms, to candidate selection, and to the candidates themselves. Unsurprisingly, campaign finance has also been the source of much debate. For decades, scholars, politicians, lawyers, and laypersons have debated the merits and shortcomings of the campaign finance system enumerated in the United States Code. The landmark Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission (“FEC”) decision in 2010, in which the United States Supreme Court equated corporate speech to human speech, merely added fuel to the fire. The considerable volume of scholarship based upon campaign finance …

Book Review: Teaching Climate Change To Adolescents: Reading, Writing, And Making A Difference, Antonio Lopez

Journal of Media Literacy Education

Teaching Climate Change to Adolescents: Reading, Writing, and Making a Difference, is a book for English language arts and media literacy teachers that provides abundant resources for educators wanting to incorporate climate change instruction into their classrooms. This review explores the usefulness of the book and discusses more broadly the barriers and opportunities for incorporating environmental issues into media literacy education.

A Bit Like Cash: Understanding Cash-For-Bitcoin Transactions Through Individual Vendors, Stephanie J. Robberson, Mark R. Mccoy

Journal of Digital Forensics, Security and Law

As technology improves and economies become more globalized, the concept of currency has evolved. Bitcoin, a cryptographic digital currency, has been embraced as a secure and convenient type of money. Due to its security and privacy for the user, Bitcoin is a good tool for conducting criminal trades. The Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) has regulations in place to make identification information of Bitcoin purchasers accessible to law enforcement, but enforcing these rules with cash-for-Bitcoin traders is difficult. This study surveyed cash-for-Bitcoin vendors in Oklahoma, Texas, Arkansas, Missouri, Kansas, Colorado, and New Mexico to determine personal demographic information, knowledge of …

Using Cyclical Components To Improve The Forecasts Of The Stock Market And Macroeconomic Variables, Kenneth R. Szulczyk, Shibley Sadique

Journal of Modern Applied Statistical Methods

Economic variables such as stock market indices, interest rates, and national output measures contain cyclical components. Forecasting methods excluding these cyclical components yield inaccurate out-of-sample forecasts. Accordingly, a three-stage procedure is developed to estimate a vector autoregression (VAR) with cyclical components. A Monte Carlo simulation shows the procedure estimates the parameters accurately. Subsequently, a VAR with cyclical components improves the root-mean-square error of out-of-sample forecasts by 50% for a stock market model with macroeconomic variables.

Improving International Development Evaluation Through Geospatial Data And Analysis, Malte Lech, Juha Ilari Uitto, Sven Harten, Geeta Batra, Anupam Anand

International Journal of Geospatial and Environmental Research

Increasing availability of new types of data strengthens geospatial research in different scientific fields and opens up opportunities to better measure results and evaluate the impacts of development interventions. This article presents examples where geospatial approaches have been applied in evaluations and thus demonstrate the potential use in informing policy design through scientifically sound evidence as well as learning.

The authors illustrate innovative ways of employing geospatial data and analysis in impact evaluations of international development cooperation. These interventions are concerned with topics such as biodiversity conservation, land degradation, sustainable use of natural resources, and disaster risk management. Recent methodological …

A Field Guide For Weathering: Embodied Tactics For Collectives Of Two Or More Humans, Jennifer Mae Hamilton, Astrida Neimanis

The Goose

In our inherited meteorological practices and frameworks, weather conditions are managed for us in a range of ways (for example, through architecture, technology, commodity culture, infrastructure, economic rationale). This field guide brings the weather back to the body. A traditional field guide provides tools for the individual sovereign human subject to observe and document nature “over there”. In contrast, through a range of different activities, our field guide not only invites investigation and cataloguing of the field that we also comprise, but also challenges what counts as a noteworthy observation regarding the weather and also climate.

Sea Squad, Liam Geary Baulch

The Goose

The Sea Squad is a band of cheerleaders against climate change. Taking action as a team in formation, they gather momentum, inviting all people to cheer with them, mimicking the infinitely expandable nature of the seas' molecular structure. The work was developed and performed as a bilingual project at Est-Nord-Est in Saint-Jean-Port-Joli, Quebec, Canada, and has since been performed and exhibited internationally. The following poems are some of the chants that Sea Squad use to get a crowd cheering together against climate change.

Comparison Of Multiple Imputation Methods For Categorical Survey Items With High Missing Rates: Application To The Family Life, Activity, Sun, Health And Eating (Flashe) Study, Benmei Liu, Erin Hennessy, April Oh, Laura A. Dwyer, Linda Nebeling

Journal of Modern Applied Statistical Methods

Two multiple imputation methods, the Sequential Regression Multivariate Imputation Algorithm and the Cox-Lannacchione Weighted Sequential Hotdeck, were examined and compared to impute highly missing categorical variables from the Family Life, Activity, Sun, Health and Eating (FLASHE) study. This paper describes the imputation approaches and results from the study.

Dealing With Sensitive Quantitative Variables: A Comparison Of Sampling Designs For The Procedure Of Gupta And Thornton, Carlos Narciso Bouza Herrera, Prayas Sharma

Journal of Modern Applied Statistical Methods

The use of randomized response procedures allows diminishing the number of non-responses and increasing the accuracy of the responses. A new sampling strategy is developed where the reports are scrambled using the procedure of Gupta and Thornton. The estimator of the mean as well as the errors are developed for the Rao-Hartley-Cochran and Ranked Sets Sampling designs. The proposals are compared with the original model based on the use of simple random sampling.

Bayesian And Semi-Bayesian Estimation Of The Parameters Of Generalized Inverse Weibull Distribution, Kamaljit Kaur, Kalpana K. Mahajan, Sangeeta Arora

Journal of Modern Applied Statistical Methods

Bayesian and semi-Bayesian estimators of parameters of the generalized inverse Weibull distribution are obtained using Jeffreys’ prior and informative prior under specific assumptions of loss function. Using simulation, the relative efficiency of the proposed estimators is obtained under different set-ups. A real life example is also given.

Yelp’S Review Filtering Algorithm, Yao Yao, Ivelin Angelov, Jack Rasmus-Vorrath, Mooyoung Lee, Daniel W. Engels

SMU Data Science Review

In this paper, we present an analysis of features influencing Yelp's proprietary review filtering algorithm. Classifying or misclassifying reviews as recommended or non-recommended affects average ratings, consumer decisions, and ultimately, business revenue. Our analysis involves systematically sampling and scraping Yelp restaurant reviews. Features are extracted from review metadata and engineered from metrics and scores generated using text classifiers and sentiment analysis. The coefficients of a multivariate logistic regression model were interpreted as quantifications of the relative importance of features in classifying reviews as recommended or non-recommended. The model classified review recommendations with an accuracy of 78%. We found that reviews …