Digital Commons Network^™

‘Night Of Brass' Planned Jan. 31 In Memphis By Ole Miss Faculty Quintet, Heather Sullivan

University of Mississippi News

UNIVERSITY, Miss. -- A "Night of Brass" will be presented by a University of Mississippi faculty quintet Jan. 31 at 7:30 p.m. in the Martie W. Buckman Performing and Fine Arts Center at St. Mary's Episcopal School in Memphis.

Barksdale Gift News Conference, Vince Mccaskill

University of Mississippi News

For video of the news conference announcing the $100 million gift to The University of Mississippi Foundation to create the Barksdale Reading Institute, click on the Real Player icon above.

Researchers Get $5 Million Award To Develop New Malaria Medicines, Mitchell Diggs

University of Mississippi News

UNIVERSITY, Miss. — Claiming more than 1 million lives and billions of dollars in health- care costs and lost productivity every year, malaria ranks right at the top of the world's health problems. So it seems fitting that the search for new malaria cures has attracted one of the largest research awards in The University of Mississippi's (UM) history.

Students Choose Study-Abroad In Scotland, Tobie Baker

University of Mississippi News

UNIVERSITY, Miss. -- Several University of Mississippi (UM) students can one day say they studied at the same place where Sherlock Holmes is thought to have been created.

Time Of Day, Aging, And Subjectively Measured Sleep Effects On Neurological Functioning Using The Weschler Memory Scale Iii, Julia R. Fitzgerald Smith

Theses and Dissertations

No abstract provided.

The Narrative Content Of Preschool Children's Drawing, Wendy Philippa Candy

Theses : Honours

The narrative content of preschool children's drawing is the focus of this study. The purpose of this study was to raise educators, preschool teachers and parents awareness of the narrative content of preschool children’s drawings and to alert them to how children of this age communicate through their drawings. A school with an operational pre-primary class was selected from the Northern Metropolitan education district of Perth. Twelve pre-school children were selected on the basis of their participation in drawing activities. The researcher observed the children at work over a period of eight sessions. A qualitative descriptive research method was used …

Images Of Ruin: Decay In A Post-Industrial World, Juha Tolonen

Theses : Honours

This thesis will examine the significance of ruin and decay in today's society, particularly the sites of industrial ruin in a post-industrial environment. It will explore the ways in which sites of ruin have been used and represented by competing cultural interests in the past and present. A focus will be on the industry of photography and its effects upon our understanding of sites of ruin, revealing possibilities for change in our aesthetic awareness of these sites. I will also include a portfolio of my own images reflecting my views and interests on a decaying industrial landscape.

Sicnn Optimisation, Two Dimensional Implementation And Comparison, Grant Walker

Theses : Honours

The study investigates the process of optimisation, implementation and comparison of a Shunting Inhibitory Cellular Neural Network (SICNN) for Edge Detection. Shunting inhibition is lateral inhibition where the inhibition function is nonlinear. Cellular Neural Networks are locally interconnected nonlinear, parallel networks which can exist as either discrete time or continuous networks. The name given to Cellular Neural Networks that use shunting inhibition as their nonlinear cell interactions are called Shunting Inhibitory Cellular Neural Networks. This project report examines some existing edge detectors and thresholding techniques. Then it describes the optimisation of the connection weight matrix for SICNN with Complementary Output …

An Exploration Of Tools, Techniques And Procedures For Evaluating Informational/Educational Multimedia Software, Serge Walberg

Theses : Honours

This thesis explored the evaluation of informational/educational systems. It investigated the features of the design of an evaluation system needed to conduct the summative evaluation of informational and educational software. In designing this evaluation methodology, several questions were addressed: - What is needed to be achieved from an evaluation? - Which characteristics/features of a system required evaluation? - How was the evaluation going to be conducted? - How can future developers use the information obtained from the evaluation? - What were the scope and the limitations of the proposed evaluation? - How can evaluation tools, techniques and procedures developed by …

Biogeography Of A Changing Landscape: Pipidinny Swamp, Yanchep National Park Western Australia, Bradley W. Boucher

Theses : Honours

The resources of Pipidinny Swamp were utilised by the Nyoongar Aboriginal people for possibly 40,000 years. Since the late 1800s, the resources of Pipidinny Swamp were used by non-Indigenous settlers. More recently, the wetland was incorporated in the Yanchep National Park in 1991.This study sought to reconstruct the changes to the natural and cultural environments within the wetland to provide background knowledge for the management board of the Park. Field investigations abo demonstrated the dynamic state of the wetland over a six-month period between low water (Feb-Apr) and high water (Aug-Oct) by monitoring the groundwater system, the vegetation system, and …

Workplace Safety Policy: Past, Present, And Future, Thomas J. Kniesner, John D. Leeth

Center for Policy Research

With an annual budget of about $400 million, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) is about 5 percent the size of the Environmental Protection Agency, another federal agency created by President Richard M. Nixon in 1970, the "Year of the Environment." Nearly all workers in the United States come under OSHA's jurisdiction, with some notable exceptions, including miners, transportation workers, many public employees, and people who are self-employed. OSHA is currently responsible for projecting over 100 million workers at 6 million work sites with the help of only about 2,000 workplace health and safety inspectors. Nevertheless, suppers of OSHA …

Medicaid, Managed Care, And Kids. 12th Annual Herbert Lourie Memorial Lecture On Health Policy, Deborah A. Freund

Center for Policy Research

This policy brief talks about what managed care for Medicaid is, how it influences kids, and how it relates to the State Child Health Insurance Program (CHIP). It focuses on what we have learned over the last 20 years through research about cost, use, and quality. It also discusses some of the expectations we had for children covered by Medicaid managed care. Finally, it talks about the future of Medicaid managed care and the implications for CHIP.

Health Promotion For Older Adults: What Is The Potential?, Linda P. Fried

Center for Policy Research

As a greater number of people reach old age, medicine is challenged to develop new approaches to this population. Health promotion, not just treatment of disease but improving the quality of life for older persons, must play a role. What happens to individuals in terms of health status as they get older, and what are the implications for health care needs? Where should we focus to get the biggest benefits in terms of health promotion? Overall, we have learned a tremendous amount over the last 25 years about the components of health as people get older, and what modifies their …

Wavelet-Based Testing For Serial Correlation Of Unknown Form In Panel Models, Chihwa Kao

Center for Policy Research

Wavelet analysis is a new mathematical tool developed as a unified field of science over the last decade. As spatially adaptive analytic tools, wavelets are useful for capturing serial correlation where the spectrum has peaks or kinks, as can arise from persistent/strong dependence, seasonality or use of seasonal data such as quarterly and monthly data, business cycles, and other kinds of periodicity. This paper proposes a new class of wavelet-based tests for serial correlation of unknown form in the estimated residuals of an error component model, where the error components can be one-way or two-way, the individual and time effects …

How Well Can We Track Cohabitation Using The Sipp? A Consideration Of Direct And Inferred Measures, Reagan Anne Baughman, Stacy Dickert-Conlin, Scott Houser

Center for Policy Research

Cohabitation is an alternative to marriage and to living independently for an increasing number of Americans. Despite this fact, research exploring links between living arrangements and economic behavior is limited by a lack of data that explicitly identify cohabiting couples. To aid researchers in using the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) rich data for cohabitation issues, our paper considers direct and inferred measures of cohabitation. Our findings suggest that: (1) the best inferred measures in pre-1966 SIPP depends upon a researcher's goals, and (2) the SIPP counts a larger number of cohabiting couples than the widely used CPS.

Microdata Panel Data And Public Policy: National And Cross-National Perspectives, Robert Carroll, Douglas Holtz-Eakin, Harvey S. Rosen, Mark Rider

Center for Policy Research

This paper investigates the effect of entrepreneurs' personal income tax situations on the growth rate of their enterprises. We analyze the personal income tax returns of a large number of sole proprietors before and after the Tax Reform Act of 1986 and determine how the substantial reductions in marginal tax rates associated with that law affected the growth of their firms as measured by gross receipts. We find that individual income taxes exert a statistically and quantitatively significant influence on firm growth rates. Raising the sole proprietor's tax price (one minus the marginal tax rate) by 10 percent increases receipts …

Now You See It, Now You Don't: Why Do Real Estate Agents Withhold Available Houses From Black Customers?, Jan Ondrich, John Yinger, Stephen Ross

Center for Policy Research

This paper develops a new approach to testing hypotheses about the causes of discrimination in housing sales. We follow previous research by using data from fair housing audits, a matched-pair technique for comparing the treatment of equally qualified black and white home buyers. Our contribution is to shift the focus from differences in the treatment of teammates during an audit to agent decisions concerning an individual housing unit. Our sample consists of all units seen by either a black of a white auditor in the 1989 national Housing Discrimination Study. We estimate a multinomial logit model to explain a real …

Microdata Panel Data And Public Policy: National And Cross-National Perspectives, Richard V. Burkhauser

Center for Policy Research

This paper focuses on the movement of data-based social policy analysis from a single-country cross-section frame to a multi-country panel frame. It provides examples of policy insights this movement to panel data has permitted, both with respect to economic well-being and behavior--using data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID), the British Household Panel Study (BHPS), the German Socio-Economic Panel (GSOEP), and the Health and Retirement Study (HRS). It also suggests fruitful areas for future panel data-based policy research.

Chronic Illness And Health Insurance-Related Job Lock, Kevin T. Stroupe, Eleanor D. Kinney, Thomas J. Kniesner

Center for Policy Research

We examine job duration patterns for evidence of health insurance-related job lock among chronically ill workers or workers with a chronically ill family member. Using Cox proportional hazard models, we allow for more general insurance effects than in the existing literature to indicate the impact of health insurance and health status on workers' job durations. We use data for workers in Indiana predating the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) to examine the potential impact of HIPAA on job mobility. Chronic illness reduced job mobility by about 40 percent among the workers in our sample who relied on their …

The Impact Of Hospital Quality-Related Practices On Health Outcomes, Deborah A. Freund, Frank R. Lichtenberg

Center for Policy Research

In this paper we analyze the cross-sectional relationship between hospital quality scores calculated by the Joint Commission on the Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations (JCAHO) and risk-adjusted indicators of outcomes and quality--mortality, rates of surgical/medical misadventures, adverse drug reactions, and length of stay--calculated from Nationwide Inpatient Sample discharge records. The results suggest that greater adherence to JCAHO accreditation standards is not associated with reduced mortality or lower probability of avoidable hospital or physician-caused adverse outcomes. Other hospital characteristics, such as teaching/non-teaching and urban/rural status, also exhibit little or no correlation with risk-adjusted survival and adverse-event probabilities.

Pharmaceuticals And The Elderly: A Comparative Analysis, Deborah A. Freund, Don Wilson, Grant D. Reeher, Bernie O'Brien

Center for Policy Research

This paper compares and contrasts outpatient pharmaceutical policies for the elderly in seven OECD nations: Australia, Canada, Germany, Japan, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Each country is facing an increasing financial burden due to rapidly growing numbers of elderly citizens, in number and as a percentage of population, and rising drug costs. As a result, they are struggling to balance varying levels of commitment to providing drugs for the elderly with the need to contain costs. Although each country's healthcare system is unique, the methods that each country is using to control rising pharmaceutical costs are …

Testing For Structural Change Of A Time Trend Regression In Panel Data, Jamie Emerson, Chihwa Kao

Center for Policy Research

In this paper we propose two classes of test statistics for detecting a break at an unknown date in panel data models with time trend. The first one is the fluctuation test of Ploberger-Kramer-Kontrus (1989). The second one is based on the mean and exponential Wald statistics of Andrew and Ploberger (1994) and maximum Wald statistic of Andrew (1993). We derive the limiting distributions of the proposed test and tabulate the critical values. Asymptotic results were derived I(0), I(1) and nearly I(1) error terms. We also show that these tests have non-trivial local power only when the error terms are …

Title Page

Basic Communication Course Annual

No abstract provided.

Editorial Board

Basic Communication Course Annual

No abstract provided.

Contents

Basic Communication Course Annual

No abstract provided.

The Effects Of Praise On Student Motivation In The Basic Communication Course, B. Scott Titsworth

Basic Communication Course Annual

This exploratory study tested the effects of praise on student motivation and affect toward a class and instructor. Participants (N=64) listened to a teacher-student interaction containing either praise or neutral feedback from the teacher. Students hearing praise reported higher levels of hypothetical affect and motivation than students hearing neutral feedback. Qualitative data were examined to help explain these results. Results are discussed in terms of future research possibilities in the basic course.

The Relationship Between A Required Self-Disclosure Speech And Public Speaking Anxiety: Considering Gender Equity, Deanna D. Sellnow, Tamara Golish

Basic Communication Course Annual

This study examines the relationship between a required self-disclosure speech and public speaking anxiety levels expressed by student speakers. If students report higher anxiety levels when asked to self-disclose during a speech, then the potential classroom climate warming advantages of such an assignment may not outweigh the disadvantages. Results indicated: (1) that most students did not report increased anxiety when presenting the self-disclosure speech; (2) there appeared to be no significant gender differences with regard to anxiety and self-disclosure in a public speaking situation; (3) students revealed that feeling confident, in control, and respected are primary factors necessary to reduce …

Critical Thinking Assessment: The Link Between Critical Thinking And Student Application In The Basic Course, Karla J. Huffman, Christy L. Carson, Cheri J. Simonds

Basic Communication Course Annual

The intent of this study is to evaluate existing literature on the concept, teaching and assessment of critical thinking. To reach this goal, critical thinking will be examined in terms of its multiple definitions, and its relationship to higher order thinking, critical teaching, and assessment.

In response to the need for a more generative and creative way of assessing critical thinking, the authors offer an activity assigned in the basic course (artifacts) as a viable tool for allowing students to take an active role in learning to think critically. The artifacts are then analyzed to determine if they serve as …

Assessment Of The Repeated Speech Performance As A Pedagogical Tool: A Pilot Study, Mark A. Gring, Jera W. Littlejohn

Basic Communication Course Annual

Realizing the ongoing need to develop pedagogy in public speaking, these researchers investigated the learning achieved by asking students to repeat one of their speech assignments. They assessed the value of this practice from the students' viewpoint as well as the statistical change in performance outcomes. Across the eight competencies evaluated, students' average scores increased significantly on the repeated speech. Students who scored in the lower quartile on the first speech benefited most from the second opportunity. The researchers conclude that allowing students to repeat a speech appears to have pedagogical and practical merit.

An Examination Of Male And Female Students' Perceptions Of Relational Closeness: Does The Basic Course Have An Influence?, Jennifer M. Heisler, Susan M. Bissett, Nancy L. Buerkel-Rothfuss

Basic Communication Course Annual

Several scholars have argued that men and women are socialized to establish interpersonal relationships, such as friendships, in different ways. Traditionally feminine individuals emphasize empathy, self-disclosure, and interdependence while masculine individuals rely on activities, helping behaviors, and advice/problem-solving. In spite of these differences, basic communication courses have provided students with only a model of traditionally feminine closeness skills in coursework and materials. This study sought to determine if, after 16 weeks of instruction in a basic communication course emphasizing feminine intimacy skills, male students would prefer masculine closeness behaviors. Three-hundred and seventy-three male and female students provided self-report data on …