Digital Commons Network^™

Evaluation Of A Newly Implemented Undergraduate Global Health Course In The Public University Setting, Brianna Moore, William Sorensen, Cheryl Cooper

William Sorensen

Religion / State: Where The Separation Lies, Vincent Samar

Vincent Samar

The article traces the history of the establishment clause including various court tests that have been used to interpret it, discusses various contemporary justifications for the clause, and culls from those justifications why the “accommodationist” approach sometimes used by the Court must be rejected.

I then introduce the ethical Doctrine of Double Effect to reconsider other tests the Court has applied (total separation, endorsement, neutrality and coercion), ultimately to justify a new neutrality test that provides a clearer understanding of the principles behind non-establishment. I show how the new neutrality test could be used in resolving future cases, for example, …

A Rasch Model Analysis Of Technology Usage In Minnesota Hospitals, John Olson, James Belohlav, Lori Cook

John Olson

No abstract provided.

Reason, Tradition, And The Good: Alasdair Macintyre's Reason Of Tradition And Frankfurt School Critical Theory, Jeffery Nicholas

Jeffery Nicholas

In Reason, Tradition, and the Good, Jeffery L. Nicholas addresses the failure of reason in modernity to bring about a just society, a society in which people can attain fulfillment. Developing the critical theory of the Frankfurt School, Nicholas argues that we rely too heavily on a conception of rationality that is divorced from tradition and, therefore, incapable of judging ends. Without the ability to judge ends, we cannot engage in debate about the good life or the proper goods that we as individuals and as a society should pursue. Nicholas claims that the project of enlightenment—defined as the promotion …

Analysis Of Salvinorin A In Plants, Water, And Urine Using Solid-Phase Microextraction-Comprehensive Two-Dimensional Gas Chromatography–Time Of Flight Mass Spectrometry, Brian Barnes, Nicholas Snow

Nicholas A Snow

No abstract provided.

Endogenous R&D And Intellectual Property Laws In Developed And Emerging Economies, Aniruddha Bagchi, Abhra Roy

Abhra Roy

The incentive of providing protection of intellectual property has been analyzed, both for an emerging economy as well as for a developed economy. The optimal patent length and the optimal patent breadth within a country are found to be positively related to each other for a fixed structure of laws abroad. Moreover, a country can respond to stronger patent protection abroad by weakening its patent protection under certain circumstances and by strengthening its patent protection under other circumstances. These results depend upon the curvature of the R&D production function. Finally, we investigate the impact of an increase in the willingness-to-pay …

Catching The Wave: Using A Milestone To Reach New Audiences, Katie Richardson, Melissa Nykanen, Jamie Henricks, Kevin Miller

Kevin C. Miller

No abstract provided.

Meteor-Radar Observed Mesospheric Semi-Annual Oscillation (Sao) And Quasi-Biennial Oscillation (Qbo) Over Maui, Hawaii, Tao Li, Alan Liu, Xian Lu, Zhenhua Li, Steven Franke, Gary Swenson, Xiankang Dou

Zhenhua Li

No abstract provided.

Assessing Higher Education Learning Outcomes In Civil Engineering: The Oecd Ahelo Feasibility Study, Roger Hadgraft, Jacob Pearce, Daniel Edwards, Julian Fraillon, Hamish Coates

Julian Fraillon

BACKGROUND

Higher education is increasingly a global business. At present, university ranking schemes are heavily reliant on research indicators, while students are likely looking for an excellent teaching and learning environment. Aware of this discrepancy, the OECD has funded the AHELO project.

PURPOSE

AHELO was designed to test the feasibility of an international assessment of higher education learning outcomes. The two test disciplines are civil engineering and economics, together with an assessment of generic skills. The civil engineering test will be reported in this paper.

More than a ranking, AHELO is a direct evaluation of student performance. It is intended …

Sneakers And Spokes: An Assessment Of The Walkabili Institutionsty And Bikeability Of U.S. Post-Secondary, Tanya Horacek, Adrienne White, Geoffrey Greene, Melissa Reznar, Virginia Quick, Jesse Morrell

Geoffrey Greene

The purpose of the study described in this article was to assess the walkability and bikeability of 15 U.S. postsecondary education campuses. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's evidence-based Healthier Worksite Initiative Walkability Audit was modified to rate campus walking and biking path segments for path safety, quality, and comfort. Universities (n = 13) assessed an average of 44 path segments, which earned a mean score of 72.71 +/- 10.77 SD (possible range 0 to 100). Postsecondary technical schools (n = 2) assessed 20 path segments, which received an average score of 76.56 +/- 13.15. About 70% of path …

Maternal Mental Health And Child Health And Nutrition, Karen Mccurdy, Kathleen Gorman, Tiffani Kisler, Elizabeth Metallinos-Katsaras

Karen McCurdy

No abstract provided.

Family Food Environment And Child Overweight In Low-Income Families, Karen Mccurdy, Tiffani Kisler, Kathleen Gorman, Elizabeth Metallinos-Katsaras

Karen McCurdy

No abstract provided.

Pillar Ii In Focus--The Responsibility To Assist: Police Capacity-Building In Timor-Leste And The 2012 Parliamentary Elections, Charles Hawksley, Nichole Georgeou

Charles M Hawksley

This briefing paper provides a short background to the 2012 elections in Timor-Leste, and explores the UNPOL mandate to support and build the capacity of the Polícia Nacional de Timor-Leste (PNTL – the Timor-Leste National Police), so that Timor-Leste will be able to manage security for its citizens without international assistance. Based on fieldwork conducted during June 2012, including interviews with human rights-focused NGOs, and with international police implementing bilateral and multilateral capacity building, we argue that the 3,200-3,400 strong PNTL is theoretically ready to go it alone when the UN Integrated Mission in Timor-Leste departs, and explore questions as …

The Change Program: Comparing An Interactive Versus Standardized Obesity Intervention On Students' Self-Esteem, Functional Health Status And Self-Efficacy For Performing Physical Activity And Nutrition Behaviours, Erin Pearson, Jennifer Irwin, Don Morrow

Donald Morrow

No abstract provided.

Computing Immutable Regions For Subspace Top-K Queries, Kyriakos Mouratidis, Hwee Hwa Pang

Kyriakos MOURATIDIS

Given a high-dimensional dataset, a top-k query can be used to shortlist the k tuples that best match the user’s preferences. Typically, these preferences regard a subset of the available dimensions (i.e., attributes) whose relative significance is expressed by user-specified weights. Along with the query result, we propose to compute for each involved dimension the maximal deviation to the corresponding weight for which the query result remains valid. The derived weight ranges, called immutable regions, are useful for performing sensitivity analysis, for finetuning the query weights, etc. In this paper, we focus on top-k queries with linear preference functions over …

Semantically Related Software Terms And Their Taxonomy By Leveraging Collaborative Tagging, Shaowei Wang, David Lo, Lingxiao Jiang

David LO

Millions of people, including those in the software engineering communities have turned to microblogging services, such as Twitter, as a means to quickly disseminate information. A number of past studies by Treude et al., Storey, and Yuan et al. have shown that a wealth of interesting information is stored in these microblogs. However, microblogs also contain a large amount of noisy content that are less relevant to software developers in engineering software systems. In this work, we perform a preliminary study to investigate the feasibility of automatic classification of microblogs into two categories: relevant and irrelevant to engineering software systems. …

When Would This Bug Get Reported?, Ferdian Thung, David Lo, Lingxiao Jiang, Lucia Lucia, Foyzur Rahman, Premkumar Devanbu

David LO

Millions of people, including those in the software engineering communities have turned to microblogging services, such as Twitter, as a means to quickly disseminate information. A number of past studies by Treude et al., Storey, and Yuan et al. have shown that a wealth of interesting information is stored in these microblogs. However, microblogs also contain a large amount of noisy content that are less relevant to software developers in engineering software systems. In this work, we perform a preliminary study to investigate the feasibility of automatic classification of microblogs into two categories: relevant and irrelevant to engineering software systems. …

Mining Indirect Antagonistic Communities From Social Interactions, Kuan Zhang, David Lo, Ee Peng Lim, Philips Kokoh Prasetyo

David LO

Antagonistic communities refer to groups of people with opposite tastes, opinions, and factions within a community. Given a set of interactions among people in a community, we develop a novel pattern mining approach to mine a set of antagonistic communities. In particular, based on a set of user-specified thresholds, we extract a set of pairs of communities that behave in opposite ways with one another. We focus on extracting a compact lossless representation based on the concept of closed patterns to prevent exploding the number of mined antagonistic communities. We also present a variation of the algorithm using a divide …

Searching Connected Api Subgraph Via Text Phrases, Wing-Kwan Chan, Hong Cheng, David Lo

David LO

Reusing APIs of existing libraries is a common practice during software development, but searching suitable APIs and their usages can be time-consuming [6]. In this paper, we study a new and more practical approach to help users find usages of APIs given only simple text phrases, when users have limited knowledge about an API library. We model API invocations as an API graph and aim to find an optimum connected subgraph that meets users' search needs. The problem is challenging since the search space in an API graph is very huge. We start with a greedy subgraph search algorithm which …

Learning Extended Fsa From Software: An Empirical Assessment, David Lo, Leonardo Mariani, Mauro Santoro

David LO

A number of techniques that infer finite state automata from execution traces have been used to support test and analysis activities. Some of these techniques can produce automata that integrate information about the data-flow, that is, they also represent how data values affect the operations executed by programs. The integration of information about operation sequences and data values into a unique model is indeed conceptually useful to accurately represent the behavior of a program. However, it is still unclear whether handling heterogeneous types of information, such as operation sequences and data values, necessarily produces higher quality models or not. In …

Scenario-Based And Value-Based Specification Mining: Better Together, David Lo, Shahar Maoz

David LO

Specification mining takes execution traces as input and extracts likely program invariants, which can be used for comprehension, verification, and evolution related tasks. In this work we integrate scenario-based specification mining, which uses a data-mining algorithm to suggest ordering constraints in the form of live sequence charts, an inter-object, visual, modal, scenario-based specification language, with mining of value-based invariants, which detects likely invariants holding at specific program points. The key to the integration is a technique we call scenario-based slicing, running on top of the mining algorithms to distinguish the scenario-specific invariants from the general ones. The resulting suggested specifications …

Observatory Of Trends In Software Related Microblogs, Achananuparp Palakorn, Nelman Lubis Ibrahim, Yuan Tian, David Lo, Ee Peng Lim

David LO

Microblogging has recently become a popular means to disseminate information among millions of people. Interestingly, software developers also use microblog to communicate with one another. Different from traditional media, microblog users tend to focus on recency and informality of content. Many tweet contents are relatively more personal and Opinionated, compared to that of traditional news report. Thus, by analyzing microblogs, one could get the up-to-date information about what people are interested in or feel toward a particular topic. In this paper, we describe our microblog observatory that aggregates more than 70,000 Twitter feeds, captures software-related tweets, and computes trends from …

Kbe-Anonymity: Test Data Anonymization For Evolving Programs, - Lucia, David Lo, Lingxiao Jiang, Aditya Budi

David LO

High-quality test data that is useful for effective testing is often available on users’ site. However, sharing data owned by users with software vendors may raise privacy concerns. Techniques are needed to enable data sharing among data owners and the vendors without leaking data privacy. Evolving programs bring additional challenges because data may be shared multiple times for every version of a program. When multiple versions of the data are cross-referenced, private information could be inferred. Although there are studies addressing the privacy issue of data sharing for testing and debugging, little work has explicitly addressed the challenges when programs …

To What Extent Could We Detect Field Defects? —An Empirical Study Of False Negatives In Static Bug Finding Tools, Ferdian Thung, - Lucia, David Lo, Lingxiao Jiang, Premkumar Devanbu, Foyzur Rahman

David LO

Software defects can cause much loss. Static bug-finding tools are believed to help detect and remove defects. These tools are designed to find programming errors; but, do they in fact help prevent actual defects that occur in the field and reported by users? If these tools had been used, would they have detected these field defects, and generated warnings that would direct programmers to fix them? To answer these questions, we perform an empirical study that investigates the effectiveness of state-of-the-art static bug finding tools on hundreds of reported and fixed defects extracted from three open source programs: Lucene, Rhino, …

Information Retrieval Based Nearest Neighbor Classification For Fine-Grained Bug Severity Prediction, Yuan Tian, David Lo, Chengnian Sun

David LO

Bugs are prevalent in software systems. Some bugs are critical and need to be fixed right away, whereas others are minor and their fixes could be postponed until resources are available. In this work, we propose a new approach leveraging information retrieval, in particular BM25-based document similarity function, to automatically predict the severity of bug reports. Our approach automatically analyzes bug reports reported in the past along with their assigned severity labels, and recommends severity labels to newly reported bug reports. Duplicate bug reports are utilized to determine what bug report features, be it textual, ordinal, or categorical, are important. …

An Empirical Study Of Bugs In Machine Learning Systems, Ferdian Thung, Shaowei Wang, David Lo, Lingxiao Jiang

David LO

Many machine learning systems that include various data mining, information retrieval, and natural language processing code and libraries have being used in real world applications. Search engines, internet advertising systems, product recommendation systems are sample users of these algorithm intensive code and libraries. Machine learning code and toolkits have also been used in many recent studies on software mining and analytics that aim to automate various software engineering tasks. With the increasing number of important applications of machine learning systems, the reliability of such systems is also becoming increasingly important. A necessary step for ensuring reliability of such systems is …

Duplicate Bug Report Detection With A Combination Of Information Retrieval And Topic Modeling, Anh Tuan Nguyen, Tung Nguyen, Tien Nguyen, David Lo, Chengnian Sun

David LO

Detecting duplicate bug reports helps reduce triaging efforts and save time for developers in fixing the same issues. Among several automated detection approaches, text-based information retrieval (IR) approaches have been shown to outperform others in term of both accuracy and time efficiency. However, those IR-based approaches do not detect well the duplicate reports on the same technical issues written in different descriptive terms. This paper introduces DBTM, a duplicate bug report detection approach that takes advantage of both IR-based features and topic-based features. DBTM models a bug report as a textual document describing certain technical issue(s), and models duplicate bug …

Automatic Classification Of Software Related Microblogs, Philips Kokoh Prasetyo, David Lo, Achananuparp Palakorn, Yuan Tian, Ee Peng Lim

David LO

Millions of people, including those in the software engineering communities have turned to microblogging services, such as Twitter, as a means to quickly disseminate information. A number of past studies by Treude et al., Storey, and Yuan et al. have shown that a wealth of interesting information is stored in these microblogs. However, microblogs also contain a large amount of noisy content that are less relevant to software developers in engineering software systems. In this work, we perform a preliminary study to investigate the feasibility of automatic classification of microblogs into two categories: relevant and irrelevant to engineering software systems. …

Interactive Fault Localization Leveraging Simple User Feedbacks, Liang Gong, David Lo, Lingxiao Jiang, Hongyu Zhang

David LO

Millions of people, including those in the software engineering communities have turned to microblogging services, such as Twitter, as a means to quickly disseminate information. A number of past studies by Treude et al., Storey, and Yuan et al. have shown that a wealth of interesting information is stored in these microblogs. However, microblogs also contain a large amount of noisy content that are less relevant to software developers in engineering software systems. In this work, we perform a preliminary study to investigate the feasibility of automatic classification of microblogs into two categories: relevant and irrelevant to engineering software systems. …

Diversity Maximization Speedup For Fault Localization, Liang Gong, David Lo, Lingxiao Jiang, Hongyu Zhang

David LO

Fault localization is useful for reducing debugging effort. However, many fault localization techniques require non-trivial number of test cases with oracles, which can determine whether a program behaves correctly for every test input. Test oracle creation is expensive because it can take much manual labeling effort. Given a number of test cases to be executed, it is challenging to minimize the number of test cases requiring manual labeling and in the meantime achieve good fault localization accuracy. To address this challenge, this paper presents a novel test case selection strategy based on Diversity Maximization Speedup (DMS). DMS orders a set …