Digital Commons Network^™

Classroom Practices And Perspective Transformation In An Adult Elementary Spanish Classroom, Stacey Margaret Johnson

Electronic Theses and Dissertations Archive

The purpose of this research was to explore students' experiences of perspective transformation and the classroom practices contributing to that transformation in a first-semester, college Spanish class. Purposeful sampling was used to choose a college-level Elementary Spanish I class to study. The qualitative case study design required the collection of three kinds of data: 1) participant observation in the classroom, 2) student learning journals, and 3) one-on-one interviews conducted with eight students purposefully sampled from the class. The criterion for selecting interview participants was evidence in the participant observation and learning journal data of the early stages of perspective transformation. …

A Comparative Analysis Of Speech Level Singing And Traditional Vocal Training In The United States, Josef William Mcclellan

Electronic Theses and Dissertations Archive

American voice teacher Seth Riggs has spent the bulk of his career developing and marketing a technique for singing called Speech Levle Singing (SLS). It is a technique based on keeping the singing voice as closely related ot the speaking voice as possible. His claim is that one can use this technique to successfully sing any style of msic, from opera to the newest pop/rock song. Traditionally in the United States most voice teachers, whether in a private studio or affiliated with a college or conservatory, teach a technique based on the traditional classical music of Western Europe. The goal …

Robert Valentine, Six Sonatas For Two Violoncellos: A Performance Edition, Simona Maria Barbu

Electronic Theses and Dissertations Archive

This document is an edition of the Sonate à due Violoncelli (Six Sonatas for Two Violoncellos) by Robert Valentine based on a microfilm belonging to the Music Library of University of Memphis, which is a reproduction of the original and the only existing manuscript of this work belonging to the British Library (Mus. Ms. 54207). The introductory chapter addresses the life and musical activity of the composer. Succeeding chapters present details about the six sonatas, such as the description of the manuscript, time and place of composition, style of composition, and performance practice issues. The Apprendices offer a critical edition …

Reflections Of Self: An Autoethnography Exploring A Survivor's Journey To Healing, Shemika Maria Harris

Electronic Theses and Dissertations Archive

This study exposed the ramifications of childhood sexual abuse in regards to an African American woman's self-representation by contextualizing this experience within the larger cultural context; thereby, illuminating issues regarding race, class, gender, and relationships with others. Framed within a feminist theoretical paradigm, this study integrated the sociological context of race and culture using Black Feminist thought (Collins, 2000) and Relational Cultural Theory, which examines women's psychological identity development (Jordan, 2010; Miller, 1976). To illustrate an African American woman's negotiation of existence as a survivor of childhood sexual abuse, this qualitative study employed the research methodology autoethnography. Employing autoethnography provides …

Educational Policies Committee Agenda, December 1, 2011, Utah State University

Educational Policies Committee

• Subcommittee Reports
• Curriculum Subcommittee
• Course Approvals
• Academic Standards Subcommittee
• General Education Subcommittee

December 2011: Volume 1 Issue 2, Dacus Library

Dacus Developments

Inside this Issue:

Christmas
Friends of Dacus Library Endowment
Dacus Library of Winthrop University
Dacus Library Benefactor Dorothy M. Medlin

Toward An Inter-American Philosophy: Pragmatism And The Philosophy Of Liberation, Alexander V. Stehn

Philosophy Faculty Publications

This essay suggests that the U.S.-American Pragmatist tradition could be fruitfully reconstructed by way of a dialogue with Latin American Liberation Philosophy. More specifically, I work to establish a common ground for future comparative work by: 1) gathering and interpreting Enrique Dussel’s scattered comments on Pragmatism, 2) showing how the concept of liberation already functions in John Dewey’s Pragmatism, and 3) suggesting reasons for further developing this inter-American philosophical dialogue and debate.

-

En este ensayo se sugiere que la tradición del pragmatismo estadounidense podría ser reconstruida de forma fructífera en un diálogo con la filosofía de la liberación latinoamericana. …

Towards Failure Free Design: An Analysis Of Risk Mitigation Communication, Daniel Krus, Katie Grantham

Engineering Management and Systems Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

In order to ensure that risk mitigation strategies are properly communicated to and understood by those who would use them in future designs, a common language of risk mitigation should exist. This paper focuses on a set of elements for describing risk mitigation strategies based on a linguistic analysis of the information such strategies must communicate to the design team. Sample strategies are then decomposed into these attributes and evaluated using the Gricean cooperation principle, relevance theory, and functional analysis theories from the pragmatics sub-field of linguistics. using the deficiencies found from this analysis, a format for risk mitigation strategies …

A Secure And Distributed Framework To Identify And Share Needed Information, Wei Jiang, Bharath K. Samanthula

Computer Science Faculty Research & Creative Works

Information analysis and communication play significant roles in decision making, especially in battle grounds and situations where national security is under threat. in many situations when information in consideration is sensitive/confidential, it is in our best interests to analyze and share only needed information to minimize the potential of security breach regarding other irrelevant but sensitive information. Thus, the goal of this paper is to investigate the required methodologies and propose an advanced communication framework that enables different entities in distributed environments to identify, share and analyze only needed information, without disclosing other unwanted but sensitive information. Such a framework …

Middleware For Supporting Content Sharing In Dynamic Networks, Mohan Kumar, Sharma Chakravarthy, Sanjay Kumar Madria, Mark Linderman, Waseem Naqvi

Computer Science Faculty Research & Creative Works

This paper proposes a middleware architecture to enable seamless content sharing in highly dynamic networks, such as those involving a number of aerial unmanned autonomous vehicles (UAVs), which are characterized by constantly changing connectivity and network topology. the proposed middleware maintains up-to-date network status as well as metadata information about data objects in the network nodes, masking the content sharing applications from the network dynamics and faults. Mechanisms for node discovery, message passing, and network management are developed. a strategy is also proposed for efficient replication to ensure availability of data in highly mobile environments. the middleware includes a message …

Regeneration Of Carbon Aerogel Exhausted In Water Purification, Sanjay Tewari

Civil, Architectural and Environmental Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

Carbon has been used electrochemically in various forms for water treatment and the carbon aerogel is one of them. Carbon Aerogels (CA) are used as electrodes due to their high surface capacity and high electrical conductivity. They are also known as Carbon Nanofoams (CNF). CA electrodes attract oppositely charged ions that are nearby. This concept is known as Capacitive De-Ionization (CDI). The use of CA in CDI for water purification is well documented, but not much work has been done on regeneration of CA electrodes. Once saturated, these electrodes lose their ability to adsorb additional ions and it must be …

Improving The Efficiency Of Lpg Compression Ignition Engines For Passenger Cars Through Waste Heat Recovery, Alberto Boretti

Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

The turbocharged direct injection lean burn Diesel engine is the most efficient now in production for transport applications with full load brake efficiencies up to 40 to 45% and reduced penalties in brake efficiencies reducing the load by the quantity of fuel injected. the secrets of this engine's performances are the high compression ratio and the lean bulk combustion mostly diffusion controlled in addition to the partial recovery of the exhaust energy to boost the charging efficiency. the major downfalls of this engine are the carbon dioxide emissions and the depletion of fossil fuels using fossil diesel, the energy security …

Simulations Of Pulse Signals With X-Parameters, Nick K.H. Huang, Lijun Jiang

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

Nonlinearity is becoming increasingly important to IC technologies. From the PHD formalism, X-parameter models provide an accurate frequency-domain method under large-signal operating points to characterize their nonlinear behaviors. In this work, X-parameter models are investigated to handle time-domain pulse signals which is critical to IC signal integrity but was not studied before. Two representative circuits, an analog LNA and a digital CMOS buffer, were employed to characterize the X-parameter performance. The results obtained in this paper provide the first hand data for pulse signal responses of X-parameters in signal integrity modelings. © 2011 IEEE.

Mixed Integral-Differential Skin-Effect Models For Peec Electromagnetic Solver, Giulio Antonini, Albert E. Ruehli, Lijun Jiang

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

Efficient modeling of the broadband skin-effect for conducting 3D shapes is a challenging issue for the solution of large electromagnetic problems. The inclusion of such models in an EM solver can be very costly in compute time and memory requirements. Several properties of a model are desirable for the solution of practical problems such as the broadband frequency domain or the time domain applicability. In this paper, we present a model which meets some of these challenges and which is suitable for the PEEC solution method. © 2011 IEEE.

Compact Metallic Rfid Tag Antennas With A Loop-Fed Method, Peng H. Yang, Yan Li, Lijun Jiang, W. C. Chew, Terry Tao Ye

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

Several compact, low profile and metal-attachable RFID tag antennas with a loop-fed method are proposed for UHF RFID systems. The structure of the proposed antennas comprise of two parts: (1) The radiator part consists of two shorted patches, which can be treated as two quarter-wave patch antennas or a cavity. (2) A small loop printed on the paper serves as the feeding structure. The small loop provides the needed inductance for the tag and is connected to the RFID chip. The input impedance of the antenna can be easily adjusted by changing loop dimensions. The antenna has the compact size …

Bycatch Of The Lake Pontchartrain Basin Inshore Shrimp Fishery And Its Effect On Two Sea Catfish Species: The Gafftopsail Catfish (Bagre Marinus) And The Hardhead Catfish (Ariopsis Felis), Scott P. Eustis

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

In Lake Pontchartrain Basin, commercial fishing in estuarine habitats impacts many non-target species collected as bycatch. I investigated the bycatch assemblages collected by commercial vessels and compared these to assemblages collected by typical fishery-independent methods. I compared assemblages using analysis of similarity (ANOSIM) and determined important species by weight and abundance using similarity percentages analyses (SIMPER). I also examined differences in size-class distributions by gear type using density kernel plots and Mann-Whitney U tests. The two gear types collected significantly different assemblages (ANOSIM R = 0.522, p = 0.001) and gear type explained more composition differences than other factors such …

Score Tests For Inverse Gaussian Mixtures, A. F. Desmond, Zhenlin Yang

Research Collection School Of Economics

The mixed inverse Gaussian given by Whitmore (Scand. J. Statist., 13, 1986, 211–220) provides a convenient way for testing the goodness-of-fit of a pure inverse Gaussian distribution. The test is a one-sided score test with the null hypothesis being the pure inverse Gaussian (i.e. the mixing parameter is zero) and the alternative a mixture. We devise a simple score test and study its finite sample properties. Monte Carlo results show that it compares favourably with the smooth test of Ducharme (Test, 10, 2001, 271-290). In practical applications, when the pure inverse Gaussian distribution is rejected, one is interested in making …

Singapore Consumer’S Inflation Expectations And Creation Of Singapore Index Of Inflation Expectations, Aurobindo Ghosh, Jun Yu

Research Collection School Of Economics

The aim of this report is to highlight a broad spectrum of issues that brings about the measurement of the disagreement and the uncertainity and the formation of inflation expectations among economic agents in Singapore.

Uniform Asymptotic Normality In Stationary And Unit Root Autoregression, Chirok Han, Peter C. B. Phillips, Donggyu Sul

Research Collection School Of Economics

While differencing transformations can eliminate nonstationarity, they typically reduce signal strength and correspondingly reduce rates of convergence in unit root autoregressions. The present paper shows that aggregating moment conditions that are formulated in differences provides an orderly mechanism for preserving information and signal strength in autoregressions with some very desirable properties. In first order autoregression, a partially aggregated estimator based on moment conditions in differences is shown to have a limiting normal distribution that holds uniformly in the autoregressive coefficient rho, including stationary and unit root cases. The rate of convergence is root n when vertical bar rho vertical bar < 1 and the limit distribution is the same as the Gaussian maximum likelihood estimator (MLE), but when rho = 1 the rate of convergence to the normal distribution is within a slowly varying factor of n. A fully aggregated estimator (FAE) is shown to have the same limit behavior in the stationary case and to have nonstandard limit distributions in unit root and near integrated cases, which reduce both the bias and the variance of the MLE. This result shows that it is possible to improve on the asymptotic behavior of the MLE without using an artificial shrinkage technique or otherwise accelerating convergence at unity at the cost of performance in the neighborhood of unity. Confidence intervals constructed from the FAE using local asymptotic theory around unity also lead to improvements over the MLE.

Capabilities Perception Of Well-­‐Being And Development Effort: Some Evidence From Afghanistan, Jean-Francois Trani, Parul Bakhshi, Cécile Rolland

Brown School Faculty Publications

This paper examines the relationship between capabilities, well-being and the impact of development efforts in Afghanistan. Using data from a nationally representative survey, we argue that very vulnerable groups maintain a positive perception of well-being by referring to collective values and practices. Our data suggest that deprivation of individual basic capabilities does not systematically lead to a low perception of well-being if individuals have access to other capabilities such as love and care and participation in the community affairs. Nevertheless, access to basic capabilities remains crucial in order to ensure that social norms and expectations cease to constitute constraints and …

Determination Of Sin2Θeff W Using Jet Charge Measurements In Hadronic Z Decays, D. Buskulic, M. Thulasidas

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The electroweak mixing angle is determined with high precision from measurements of the mean dierence between forward and backward hemisphere charges in hadronic decays of the Z. A data sample of 2:5 million hadronic Z decays recorded over the period 1990 to 1994 in the ALEPH detector at LEP is used. The mean charge separation between event hemispheres containing the original quark and antiquark is measured for b b and cc events in subsamples selected by their long lifetimes or using fast D 's. The corresponding average charge separation for light quarks is measured in an inclusive sample from the …

Galaxy Browser: Exploratory Search Of Web Videos, Lei Pang, Song Tan, Hung-Khoon Tan, Chong-Wah Ngo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Most search engines return a ranked list of items in response to a query. The list however tells very little about the relationship among items. For videos especially, users often read to spend significant amount of time to navigate the search result. Exploratory search presents a new paradigm for browsing where the browser takes up the role of information exploring and presents a well-organized browsing structure for users to navigate. The proposed interface Galaxy Browser adopts the recent advances in near-duplicate detection and then synchronizes the detected near-duplicate information with comprehensive background knowledge derived from online external resources. The result …

On The Pooling Of Positive Examples With Ontology For Visual Concept Learning, Shiai Zhu, Chong-Wah Ngo, Yu-Gang Jiang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

A common obstacle in effective learning of visual concept classifiers is the scarcity of positive training examples due to expensive labeling cost. This paper explores the sampling of weakly tagged web images for concept learning without human assistance. In particular, ontology knowledge is incorporated for semantic pooling of positive examples from ontologically neighboring concepts. This effectively widens the coverage of the positive samples with visually more diversified content, which is important for learning a good concept classifier. We experiment with two learning strategies: aggregate and incremental. The former strategy re-trains a new classifier by combining existing and newly collected examples, …

Vireo@Trecvid 2011: Instance Search, Semantic Indexing, Multimedia Event Detection And Known-Item Search, Chong-Wah Ngo, Shi-Ai Zhu, Wei Zhang, Chun-Chet Tan, Ting Yao, Lei Pang, Hung-Khoon Tan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The vireo group participated in four tasks: instance search, semantic indexing, multimedia event detection and known-item search. In this paper,we will present our approaches and discuss the evaluation results.

Automated Removal Of Cross Site Scripting Vulnerabilities In Web Applications, Lwin Khin Shar, Hee Beng Kuan Tan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Context: Cross site scripting (XSS) vulnerability is among the top web application vulnerabilities according to recent surveys. This vulnerability occurs when a web application uses inputs received from users in web pages without properly checking them. This allows an attacker to inject malicious scripts in web pages via such inputs such that the scripts perform malicious actions when a client visits the exploited web pages. Such an attack may cause serious security violations such as account hijacking and cookie theft. Current approaches to mitigate this problem mainly focus on effective detection of XSS vulnerabilities in the programs or prevention of …

Gender Differences In Virtual Collaboration On A Creative Design Task, Shu Schiller, Fiona Nah, Brian Mennecke, Keng Siau

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Collaboration is an important activity in every organization because it fundamentally affects work processes and organizational outcomes. Diversity adds complexity to the mechanism of virtual teams because teams routinely operate virtually by spanning temporal, geographic, national, and cultural boundaries. One important way to decode such complexity is to understand gender differences and their impacts on virtual modes of collaboration. In this research, we examine gender differences and how they influence outcomes and attitudes on virtual collaboration in the context of team gender composition. Phase one of our study involved male-male dyads and female-female dyads that collaborated virtually in Second Life. …

Value Relevance Of Blog Visibility, Nan Hu, Ling Liu, Arindam Tripathy, Lee J. Yao

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This study empirically examines the effect of a non-traditional information source, namely a firm's blog visibility on the capital market valuation of firms. After controlling for earnings, book value of equity and other value relevant variables, such as traditional media exposure, R&D spending, and advertising expense, we find a positive association between a firm's blog visibility and its capital market valuation. In addition, we find blog visibility Grange causes trading, not vice versa. Our findings indicate that non-traditional information sources such as blogs help disseminate information and influence consumers' investment decisions by capturing their attention.

Tag-Based Social Image Search With Visual-Text Joint Hypergraph Learning, Yue Gao, Meng Wang, Huanboo Luan, Jialie Shen, Shuicheng Yan, Dacheng Tao

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Tag-based social image search has attracted great interest and how to order the search results based on relevance level is a research problem. Visual content of images and tags have both been investigated. However, existing methods usually employ tags and visual content separately or sequentially to learn the image relevance. This paper proposes a tag-based image search with visual-text joint hypergraph learning. We simultaneously investigate the bag-of-words and bag-of-visual-words representations of images and accomplish the relevance estimation with a hypergraph learning approach. Each textual or visual word generates a hyperedge in the constructed hypergraph. We conduct experiments with a real-world …

Case Study On Using A Programming Practice Tool For Evaluating University Applicants, Shannon Christopher Boesch, Kevin Steppe

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We used a programming practice tool to test basic programming skills of prospective students. A live competition was used to test those skills. Students who did well were asked for further interviews. Most students had no prior background and reported learning the basics of two programming languages within two weeks of self-study.

On Two Rfid Privacy Notions And Their Relations, Yingjiu Li, Robert H. Deng, Junzuo Lai, Changshe Ma

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Privacy of RFID systems is receiving increasing attention in the RFID community. Basically, there are two kinds of RFID privacy notions in the literature: one based on the indistinguishability of two tags, denoted as ind-privacy, and the other based on the unpredictability of the output of an RFID protocol, denoted as unp*-privacy. In this article, we first revisit the existing unpredictability-based RFID privacy models and point out their limitations. We then propose a new RFID privacy model, denoted as unp*-privacy, based on the indistinguishability of a real tag and a virtual tag. We formally clarify its relationship with the ind-privacy …