Digital Commons Network^™

Mobile Search Engine Using Clustering And Query Expansion, Huy Nguyen

Master's Projects

Internet content is growing exponentially and searching for useful content is a tedious task that we all deal with today. Mobile phones lack of screen space and limited interaction methods makes traditional search engine interface very inefficient. As the use of mobile internet continues to grow there is a need for an effective search tool. I have created a mobile search engine that uses clustering and query expansion to find relevant web pages efficiently. Clustering organizes web pages into groups that reflect different components of a query topic. Users can ignore clusters that they find irrelevant so they are not …

Reliable Broadcasting In Vanet, Pat Jangyodsuk

Master's Projects

Vehicular Adhoc NETwork (VANET) is a rapid growing wireless ad-hoc network model where the vehicles play the nodes role in a network. Major application of VANET including hazard warning application requires effective broadcast mechanism. Typically, selection of the next relaying hop is the major problem in VANET broadcasting. To get the smallest propagational delay, the number of relaying hops must be minimize. Meanwhile, the transmission reliability must also be preserved. Both of these two constrains must be taken into consideration. However, these two aspects often collide to each other since increasing one of them always result in decreasing of another. …

The Activelecture System, Sanuja Dabade

Master's Projects

For an instructor, it has always been a challenging task to keep students engaged during the lecture and assess them in real time. Instructors use different methodologies to address the challenge of keeping students engaged during the class and increase their participation. Widely used methodologies for active learning include clickers and Tablet PCs. Clickers are small handheld devices which are used to collect student responses and present these responses graphically. Tablet PCs provide a functionality to use natural handwriting to provide feedback. Web browsers are a cost effective approaches. I have used a web based technology to create active learning …

Clustering And Validation Of Microarray Data Using Consensus Clustering, Sarbinder Kallar

Master's Projects

Clustering is a popular method to glean useful information from microarray data. Unfortunately the results obtained from the common clustering algorithms are not consistent and even with multiple runs of different algorithms a further validation step is required. Due to absence of well defined class labels, and unknown number of clusters, the unsupervised learning problem of finding optimal clustering is hard. Obtaining a consensus of judiciously obtained clusterings not only provides stable results but also lends a high level of confidence in the quality of results. Several base algorithm runs are used to generate clusterings and a co-association matrix of …

Scala Server Faces, Vikas Vittal Rao

Master's Projects

Progress in the Java language has been slow over the last few years. Scala is emerging as one of the probable successors for Java with features such as type inference, higher order functions, closure support and sequence comprehensions. This allows object-oriented yet concise code to be written using Scala. While Java based MVC frameworks are still prevalent, Scala based frameworks along with Ruby on Rails, Django and PHP are emerging as competitors. Scala has a web framework called Lift which has made an attempt to borrow the advantages of other frameworks while keeping code concise. Since Sun’s MVC framework, Java …

Enhancing Open-Source Localization, Farzana Forhad

Master's Projects

Pootle is a web portal which is designed to be a web translation tool. We can run Pootle like an internet server and run a local copy on an intranet. Pootle has a user friendly interface which ensures better quality and easier translation of projects. Users can log into the Pootle and create their own projects under any language, and they can also add or retrieve any language from any project or any project from any language. Although Pootle has many advantages, it also has its drawbacks, and one of the biggest drawbacks of Pootle is that whatever translation is …

Email Data Mining: An Approach To Construct An Organization Position-Wise Structure While Performing Email Analysis, Bhargav Vadher

Master's Projects

In this age of social networking, it is necessary to define the relationships among the members of a social network. Various techniques are already available to define user- to-user relationships across the network. Over time, many algorithms and machine learning techniques were applied to find relationships over social networks, yet very few techniques and information are available to define a relation directly over raw email data. Few educational societies have developed a way to mine the email log files and have found the inter-relation between the users by means of clusters. Again, there is no solid technique available that can …

Open Source Analysis Of Biomedical Figures, David Shao

Master's Projects

With a selection of biomedical literature available for open access, a natural pairing seems to be the use of open source software to automatically analyze content, in particular, the content of gures. Considering the large number of possible tools and approaches, we choose to focus on the recognition of printed characters. As the problem of optical character recognition (OCR) under rea- sonable conditions is considered to be solved, and as open source software is fully capable of isolating the location of characters and identifying most of them accurately, we instead use OCR as an application area for the relatively recent …

Parallel Programming Recipes, Thuy C. Nguyenphuc

Master's Projects

Parallel programming has become vital for the success of commercial applications since Moore’s Law will now be used to double the processors (or cores) per chip every technology generation. The performance of applications depends on how software executions can be mapped on the multi-core chip, and how efficiently they run the cores. Currently, the increase of parallelism in software development is necessary, not only for taking advantage of multi-core capability, but also for adapting and surviving in the new silicon implementation. This project will provide the performance characteristics of parallelism for some common algorithms or computations using different parallel languages. …

Introducing Stem Majors To The Teaching Profession Through Authentic Experiences As Tutors, Grinell Smith

Faculty Publications

Recruiting people with rich backgrounds in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) into the teaching profession has historically been difficult and remains so today. In this bounded instrumental case study, undergraduate STEM majors were trained and placed as science and math tutors in grades 9-12, with an overarching goal of encouraging them to consider teaching as a possible career path. Several themes emerged from the tutors’ experiences as significant in their willingness to consider a career in teaching, including altruism from helping others, satisfaction from tutees’ improved academic performance, and a more nuanced understanding of the complex nature of teaching.

Computational Fluctuating Fluid Dynamics, Alejandro Garcia, J. B. Bell, S. Williams

Faculty Publications

This paper describes the extension of a recently developed numerical solver for the Landau-Lifshitz Navier-Stokes (LLNS) equations to binary mixtures in three dimensions. The LLNS equations incorporate thermal fluctuations into macroscopic hydrodynamics by using white-noise fluxes. These stochastic PDEs are more complicated in three dimensions due to the tensorial form of the correlations for the stochastic fluxes and in mixtures due to couplings of energy and concentration fluxes (e.g., Soret effect). We present various numerical tests of systems in and out of equilibrium, including time-dependent systems, and demonstrate good agreement with theoretical results and molecular simulation

Teaching Artists In The High School: A Creative Approach To Student Self-Esteem, Jennifer Nye Walsh

Master's Theses

This thesis addresses the effect of teaching artists' (TAs) classroom instruction in the arts on student self-esteem at Downtown College Preparatory (DCP) High School, an at-risk high school in San Jose, California, over the course of two semesters. The data collected and used to analyze these effects were student observations, student art work, student journal entries, student surveys, and data provided by a third party consulting company. The purpose of this study was to determine if having teaching artists working in an at-risk high school classroom environment could positively affect their students' self-esteem through their arts programming. The results showed …

Social Support As Moderator Of Job-Specific Or Generic Stressors With Strains, Kaci Deeana Mabe

Master's Theses

Two studies examining the relationship between job-specific stressors and strains versus the relationship between generic stressors with strain, as well as the moderating role of social support (from coworkers and administrators), are presented. Eighteen primary school teachers from a private Jewish day school (Study 1) and 242 teachers from an Arizona school district (Study 2) completed self-administered surveys. Results indicated that job-specific (vs. generic) stressors had a stronger positive relationship with strains, but social support was a better moderator for the relationship between generic stressors and strain. As hypothesized, administrator support had a reverse-buffering effect on the stressor-strain relationship in …

Family Of Circulant Graphs And Its Expander Properties, Vinh Kha Nguyen Tran Nguyen

Master's Theses

In this thesis, we apply spectral graph theory to show the non-existence of an

expander family within the class of circulant graphs. Using the adjacency matrix and its properties, we prove Cheeger's inequalities and determine when the equalities hold. In order to apply Cheeger's inequalities, we compute the spectrum of a general circulant graph and approximate its second largest eigenvalue. Finally, we show that circulant graphs do not contain an expander family.

Reading Habits Of Senior Secondary Students At Allahabad City, U.P., India, Devendra Kumar, M. M.A. Ansari

Library Philosophy and Practice (e-journal)

This is a report on a readership survey carried out among the senior secondary students at Allahabad City, U.P. (India). The present study explores the reading habits of senior secondary students in Allahabad City. The present study demonstrates the various aspects of reading habits like the motives of study, reading materials borrowed from library, time spent for the serious reading, use reference materials, languages of newspaper that read daily, sections of newspapers read, place of reading, and to develop some suggestions for solution of the problem. Suggestions have been given to make the service more beneficial in the school libraries.

Deliberation Versus Dispute: The Impact Of Argumentative Discourse Goals On Learning And Reasoning In The Science Classroom, Mark Felton, Merce Garcia-Mila, Sandra Gilabert

Faculty Publications

Researchers in science education have converged on the view that argumentation can be an effective intervention for promoting knowledge construction in science classrooms.However, the impact of such interventions may be mediated by individuals’ task goals while arguing. In argumentative discourse, one can distinguish two overlapping but distinct kinds of activity: dispute and deliberation. In dispute the goal is to defend a conclusion by undermining alternatives, whereas in deliberation the goal is to arrive at a conclusion by contrasting alternatives. In this study, we examine the impact of these discourse goals on both content learning and argument quality in science.

Information Outlook, December 2009, Special Libraries Association

Information Outlook, 2009

Volume 13, Issue 8

Spartan Daily November 9, 2009, San Jose State University, School Of Journalism And Mass Communications

Spartan Daily (School of Journalism and Mass Communications)

Volume 133, Issue 37

Tracing The Archetypal Academic Librarian, Stephen E. Bales

Library Philosophy and Practice (e-journal)

This paper analyzes the available evidence to develop a model of the archetypal academic librarian. It compares three periods to do so: (1) pre-Alexandrian Mesopotamian information institutions, focusing on the seventh century BCE Library of Assurbanipal (considered by many scholars to be the first universal or national library), (2) the Great Library of Alexandria (hereafter referred to as “the Library”), and (3) the twenty-first century American academic library. While the basic functions of the librarian have remained constant over thousands of years, one critical element, however, is missing as an integral element of modern academic librarianship, the creation of new …

Citation Analysis Of Doctoral Works Submitted To The Department Of Animal Science, University Of Ibadan, Nigeria, Wole Michael Olatokun

Library Philosophy and Practice (e-journal)

The objective of this study was to carry out a citation analysis of doctoral theses submitted to the department of Animal science, University of Ibadan, Nigeria, with a view to finding possible relationships between citing, cited articles and authors (doctoral students). The research design used was the descriptive survey with the research elements for the study being the theses submitted for the award of doctoral degrees during the period 2000-2007. Frequency and percentage distributions (presented in charts, tables, and graphs) and measures of central tendency were used to analyse data. Findings showed that journals, books and conference papers ranked the …

Hiring The Reference Librarian: An Examination Of Duty Equivalents, Beatrice Priestly

Library Philosophy and Practice (e-journal)

The purpose of this study is to provide an examination of reference librarian duty equivalents in other careers, to provide a calculation of the weighted worth in wages culminating in a recommended hiring salary. The study proposes other job titles whose duties relate to portions of the reference librarian’s day, providing a calculated view of the duties’ weighted worth after close examination of the US Government Bureau of Labor Statistics web site at www.bls.gov and their presentation of wage earnings data collected May 2006 and then posted to their web site April 2007.

Validity Of The Spin-Susceptibility “Glue” Approximation For Pairing In The Two-Dimensional Hubbard Model, Ehsan Khatami, A. Macridin, M. Jarrell

Faculty Publications

We examine the validity of the weak-coupling spin-susceptibility “glue” approximation (SSGA) in a two-dimensional Hubbard model for cuprates. For comparison, we employ the well-established dynamical cluster approximation (DCA) with a quantum Monte Carlo algorithm as a cluster solver. We compare the leading eigenvalues and corresponding eigenfunctions of the DCA and SSGA pairing matrices. For realistic model parameters, we find that the SSGA fails to capture the leading pairing symmetries seen in the DCA. Furthermore, when the SSGA is improved through the addition of a term with d-wave symmetry, the strength of this additional term is found to be larger than …

Spartan Daily October 29, 2009, San Jose State University, School Of Journalism And Mass Communications

Spartan Daily (School of Journalism and Mass Communications)

Volume 133, Issue 32

Spartan Daily October 28, 2009, San Jose State University, School Of Journalism And Mass Communications

Spartan Daily (School of Journalism and Mass Communications)

Volume 133, Issue 31

Segmented Professions: Further Considerations Of Theory And Practice In Lis And Librarianship, Andrew Carlin

Library Philosophy and Practice (e-journal)

How relevant are theories of information to practical library work? Using sociology and the philosophy of social sciences, this essay discusses how theoretical work defines an area of knowledge in relation to other fields, the identification of researchable phenomena, and how phenomena are established as its own subject matter. Theorizing is a generic activity, highlighting connections between theory and practice, profession and field. While proposing that theorizing is important, this paper explores the nature of theorizing in LIS, and suggests that its cognitivistic foundations impede theory development. Information is a linkage between theory and practice, and this paper argues that …

Spartan Daily October 27, 2009, San Jose State University, School Of Journalism And Mass Communications

Spartan Daily (School of Journalism and Mass Communications)

Volume 133, Issue 30

Spartan Daily October 14, 2009, San Jose State University, School Of Journalism And Mass Communications

Spartan Daily (School of Journalism and Mass Communications)

Volume 133, Issue 25

Meeting The Need For K-8 Teachers For Classrooms With Culturally And Linguistically Diverse Students: The Promise And Challenge Of Early Field Experiences, Amy Strage, Susan Gomez, Kari Knutson-Miller, Ana Garcia-Nevarez

Faculty Publications

The writers present the findings of their study focused on teacher learning through early fieldwork experiences to address the problem of teachers working with a culturally and linguistically diverse student population. Data were analyzed from an archive collected from approximately 500 students enrolled in six undergraduate child development courses at three state university campuses located in urban areas of California. Findings suggest that early field experiences provide participants with opportunities for career goal clarification, and the context of field experience is significant and may lead to outcomes beyond the initial goal of the experience.

Thermodynamics Of The Quantum Critical Point At Finite Doping In The Two-Dimensional Hubbard Model Studied Via The Dynamical Cluster Approximation, K. Mikelsons, Ehsan Khatami, D. Galanakis, A. Macridin, J. Moreno, M. Jarrell

Faculty Publications

We study the thermodynamics of the two-dimensional Hubbard model within the dynamical cluster approximation. We use continuous time quantum Monte Carlo as a cluster solver to avoid the systematic error which complicates the calculation of the entropy and potential energy (double occupancy). We find that at a critical filling, there is a pronounced peak in the entropy divided by temperature, S/T, and in the normalized double occupancy as a function of doping. At this filling, we find that specific heat divided by temperature, C/T, increases strongly with decreasing temperature and kinetic and potential energies vary like T2 ln T. These …

Rail Passenger Selective Screening Summit, Mti S-09-01, Mti

Mineta Transportation Institute

This publication is an edited transcript of the Rail Passenger Selective Screening Summit, which was co-sponsored by MTI and the American Public Transportation Association (APTA) in Chicago, Illinois on June 18, 2009, during APTA´s annual Rail Conference. The workshop was moderated by Brian Michael Jenkins, director, Mineta Transportation Institute's National Transportation Security Center of Excellence (NTSCOE). Speakers included Bruce R. Butterworth, co-author, Selective Screening of Rail Passengers; Greg Hull, president, American Public Transportation Association (APTA); Paul MacMillan, chief of police, Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority, Transit Police Department; Ron Masciana, deputy chief, Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA), New York; Jesus Ojeda, security …