Digital Commons Network^™

Choice, Coercion, Capabilities And Conflict: Multilingualism, Human Development And Peacekeeping In A Globalized World, Megan R. Thompson

Honors Projects

The development of English into an international lingua franca is not an inevitable result of globalizing forces. Instead, the “triumph” of the English language and the consequent decline of the world’s linguistic diversity cannot be viewed in isolation of its parallel history of conquest, violence, power and exploitation. Today, the languages privileged by the powerful—not only English, but also other dominant languages or standard varieties of those languages—determine access to social, economic and political mobility. This fact renders any discussion of language “choice” irrelevant—when a choice yields the sacrifice of basic human capabilities on one hand and the denial of …

Bringing Balance To The Table: Comprehensive Writing Instruction In The Tutoring Session, Bethany Bibb

The Writing Center Journal

No abstract provided.

Announcements

The Writing Center Journal

No abstract provided.

Information For Authors

The Writing Center Journal

No abstract provided.

Comparing Technologies For Online Writing Conferences: Effects Of Medium On Conversation, Joanna Wolfe, Jo Ann Griffin

The Writing Center Journal

No abstract provided.

Announcements

The Writing Center Journal

No abstract provided.

Quality Of Service Optimisation Framework For Next Generation Networks, Frank Gerd Weber

School of Engineering, Computing and Mathematics Theses

Within recent years, the concept of Next Generation Networks (NGN) has become widely accepted within the telecommunication area, in parallel with the migration of telecommunication networks from traditional circuit-switched technologies such as ISDN (Integrated Services Digital Network) towards packet-switched NGN. In this context, SIP (Session Initiation Protocol), originally developed for Internet use only, has emerged as the major signalling protocol for multimedia sessions in IP (Internet Protocol) based NGN. One of the traditional limitations of IP when faced with the challenges of real-time communications is the lack of quality support at the network layer. In line with NGN specification work, …

Working Paper Of Reflections In The Eyes Of A Dying Tiger: Looking Back On Ireland's 1987 Economic Crisis, Brendan O'Rourke, John Hogan

Books/Book Chapters

This work examines the discourses about previous Irish crises , in radio chat interviews with a former finance minister and an economists, during the current Irish economic crise.

Mobispatial: Open Source For Mobile Spatial Interaction, Junjun Yin, James Carswell

Conference papers

This paper describes our Mobile Spatial Interaction (MSI) prototype MobiSpatial, which benefits from location and orientation aware smartphones and existing open source spatial data initiatives to facilitate user interaction with the geospatial query process. We utilize today’s ubiquitous mobile device as the central computing platform to calculate a mobile user’s visibility shape at his/her current location. MobiSpatial uses this shape as a query “window” in a spatial database to perform line-of-sight, field-of-view and 360º Isovist visibility searches. These visibility based spatial queries reduce the risk of “information overload” by exploiting “hidden query removal” functionality to retrieve only those objects that …

Education Is Positively Associated With Macular Pigment: The Irish Longitudinal Study On Ageing (Tilda), John Nolan, Joanne Feeney, Rose Anne Kenny, Hilary Cronin, Claire O'Regan, George Savva, James Loughman, Ciaran Finucane, Eithne Connolly, Katie Meagher, Stephen Beatty

Articles

The three carotenoids lutein, zeaxanthin, and meso-zeaxanthin, are found at the macula and referred to as macular pigment (MP). This study was undertaken to investigate determinants of MP in a large randomly selected sample from the Republic of Ireland (as part of The Irish Longitudinal Study on Ageing [TILDA]).

METHODS:

MP optical density (MPOD) was measured using customized heterochromatic flicker photometry in 4373 participants. Sociodemographic and self reported health data was obtained using computer assisted personal interview (CAPI).

RESULTS

Mean (SD) MPOD for the study group was 0.203 (0.156) with a range of 0 to 1.01. MPOD was higher for …

Exploring Social Media As A Means Of Fostering Student Engagement, Rosie Hand

Teaching Fellowships

p>The overall of this project was to explore the emerging potential of social media as a tool to engage students and enhance their learning. The specific objectives were: to assess the potential uses of social media as a means to foster student engagement: to explore creative methods of leveraging existing and new social media technologies to enhance the overall student experience: to assist programme directors and lecturers in identifying opportunities where social media may be utilised to enhance module and programme delivery. Google+ was identified as an appropriate social media platform to engage with students for formal teaching purposes. …

Practice Makes Practice . . . Visible? Revealing Structures Of The Artistic Field By Articulating The Evasive Properties Inherent In Its Systems Of Production Through Art Practice, Naomi Elizabeth Sex

Other

This practice-led research project attempts to seek out and reveal the structures that frame the production of art practice, through and with art practice itself. With this premise in mind, the first phase of the study aims to use practice-led research by adopting quasi-ethnographic strategies firstly to explore the field of artistic production, and secondly in an attempt to activate, capture and contain tangible evidence that the artistic field is powered by persuasive informal discourse and practices that contribute to stringent and hierarchical rules of engagement. Entering the second phase of the project the contribution of this study is based …

Reclaiming Literacy Classroom Through Critical Dialogue, Bob Fecho, Dawan Coombs, Sean Mcauley

Faculty Publications

Tim (all student names are pseudonyms), a young English teacher, took a position in a corporately owned charter school. Despite misgivings—“Just not sure privatization and choice are the saviors of public education”—Tim needed a job and accepted what was offered.

Typically for Tim, he threw himself into his teaching, getting additionally involved in class sponsorship and student government. As an offshoot of these activities, Tim asked his sophomore classes to write about, and then discuss, the seeming lack of school spirit and what they could do about it:

Restaurant Selection In Dublin, Frank Cullen

Articles

The primary objective of this research was to investigate the selection process used by consumers when choosing a restaurant to dine. This study examined literature on consumer behaviour, restaurant selection, and decision-making, underpinning the contention that service quality is linked to the consumer’s selection of a restaurant. It supports the utility theories that consumers buy bundles of attributes that simultaneously combined represent a certain level of service quality at a certain price. The findings of the research displayed a preference by Dublin consumers for Italian and Chinese styled restaurants and identified quality of the food, type of food, cleanliness of …

Recommissioned Energy Control Strategy For Rte Television Centre's Chilled Water System, James Mcconnologue

SDAR* Journal of Sustainable Design & Applied Research

This paper investigates the energy performance of a building’s chilled water system (CHWS), primarily focusing on the systems direct electrical energy consumption and the potential for delivering improvements to increase the overall operational efficiencies of the CHWS. The CHWS supplies the cooling energy requirements of the RTE Television Centre’s Air Handling Units (AHU’s). This paper presents a detailed energy audit of both the current cooling energy load and the CHWS, while outlining a cohesive control strategy that focused on reducing the CHWS load by implementing free cooling methodologies for the building’s AHUs. The paper continues by presenting a descriptive analysis …

The Hotel As The Holiday/Stay Destination: Trends And Innovations., Gereva Hackett, Detta Melia

Conference papers

This paper analyses trends in the international hotel industry and provides insights into the trends that are most likely to influence future business success. Trends, such as, design, social and lifestyle changes, the eco-hotel, the historically significant hotel, the sports hotel, the health spa, the quirky hotel, the boutique hotel and the fashionable hotel which are differentiating the traditional hotel product are discussed. This paper is based on primary and secondary research providing a comprehensive snapshot of trends in the sector. Primary research was carried out through an in-depth study and content analysis of hotels worldwide.

These hotels are now …

Is There A Future / Career For Tourist Guides?, Detta Melia, Josephine Rice

Conference papers

Tourist guides are the essential interface between a tourism destination and its visitors, and are very much responsible for the overall impression and satisfaction offered by a destination. However, despite the prominent role that tourist guides play in the system of tourism, fairly scant scientific attention has been paid to them to date. Tourist Guides create a link between the visitor and the host country. Yet, of the small amount of literature devoted to them, very few studies have asked tourist guides their views and opinions, and have built up a profile of the tourist guide. This paper is an …

International Office News, Fall 2012, Illinois Wesleyan University

International Office News

No abstract provided.

The Irish ‘Working Group On Information Literacy’ E Edging Towards A National Policy, Terry O'Brien, Philip Russell

Support services (Former ITT) - Articles

The authors of this paper provide an overview of the activities of the Irish Working Group on Information Literacy (WGIL) and its role in advancing a national policy for information literacy in the Republic of Ireland. The study focuses on the work of the group during its lifetime including the various activities, marketing and advocacy initiatives and some of the challenges and issues the group faced, in particular, the diversity of the Irish library and information sector and the lack of an integrated approach for information literacy development. The study presents the findings of the report produced by WGIL entitled …

Evaluating The Similarity Estimator Component Of The Twin Personality-Based Recommender System, Alexandra Roshchina, John Cardiff, Paolo Rosso

Conference Papers

With the constant increase in the amount of information available in online communities, the task of building an appropriate Recommender System to support the user in her decision making process is becoming more and more challenging. In addition to the classical collaborative filtering and content based approaches, taking into account ratings, preferences and demographic characteristics of the users, a new type of Recommender System, based on personality parameters, has been emerging recently. In this paper we describe the TWIN (Tell Me What I Need) Personality Based Recommender System, and report on our experiments and experiences of utilizing techniques which allow …

Development Of Student Centred Knowledge Management System Based In A Higher Education Institution, Chong Liu

Dissertations

With the emergence of a knowledge society and of information technology, knowledge has become a key resource to develop a sustained economy. It is a vital word in the Knowledge Management area (Awad & Ghaziri, 2004). Knowledge Management has also become vital to help knowledge organizations seek a competitive advantage. It also encourages members of organization to share knowledge and improve the organization‘s efficiency, performance, and competitiveness (Shin, 2004). Therefore, an increasing number of organizations have realized the necessity of knowledge management. Especially, the Higher Education Institute (HEI) as the extraordinary ―business‖ will be suitable for implementing knowledge management approaches …

E-Learning And Knowledge Management: The Development Of An E-Learning System For Organisational Training, Alan Muhire

Dissertations

Information technology has major role in most successful companies and organisations around the world, most companies are using IT to reduce operation cost, while improving customer service by providing service twenty four hours, seven days a week and improving communication that helps keep pace with competitors. In most companies and organisation training is a process carried out on a regular basis; the quality of training offered to employee will be reflected on how knowledgeable the staff will become resulting in the organisation becoming more successful. As organisations and companies are currently interested in improving knowledge management, employees are equally working …

Development Of An In-Cell Förster Resonance Energy Transfer Technique To Study Protein Structure Inside Living Cells, Victoria Lynn Murray

Wayne State University Dissertations

The goal of my thesis is to develop an in-cell fluorescence technique that allows for measurement of the distances between fluorescence acceptors and donors within a protein or between two proteins inside the correct intracellular compartment of living cells. The successful achievement of this goal will allow us to obtain high-resolution structural information from a protein, one key step towards high-resolution structural biology of proteins inside the living cell.

To achieve this goal, we will apply the fluorescence resonance energy transfer (FRET) technique to the specifically labeled proteins inside the cells. Our rationale is to specifically label the protein(s) of …

100% Lpg Long Haul Truck Conversion - Economy And Environmental Benefits, Alberto A. Boretti, Charles Grummisch

Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

Advanced Vehicle Technologies (AVT), a Ballarat Australia based company, has developed the World's first diesel to 100% LPG conversion for heavy haul trucks. There is no diesel required or utilized on the trucks. the engine is converted with minimal changes into a spark ignition engine with equivalent power and torque of the diesel. the patented technology is now deployed in 2 Mercedes Actros trucks. the power output in engine dynamometer testing exceeds that of the diesel (in excess of 370 kW power and 2700 Nm torque). in on-road application the power curve is matched to the diesel specifications to avoid …

Hardware Emulation Of Wideband Correlated Multiple-Input Multiple-Output Fading Channels, Fei Ren, Yahong Rosa Zheng

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

A low-complexity hardware emulator is proposed for wideband, correlated, multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) fading channels. the proposed emulator generates multiple discrete-time channel impulse responses (CIR) at the symbol rate and incorporates three types of correlation functions of the subchannels via Kronecker product: The spatial correlation between transmit or receive elements, temporal correlation due to Doppler shifts, and inter-tap correlation due to multipaths. the Kronecker product is implemented by a novel mixed parallel-serial (mixed P-S) matrix multiplication method to reduce memory storage and to meet the real-time requirement in high data-rate, large MIMO size, or long CIR systems. We present two practical …

Biological Evaluation Of A Novel Tissue Engineering Scaffold Of Layered Double Hydroxides (Ldhs), Fateme Fayyazbakhsh, Mehran Solati-Hashjin, M. A. Shokrgozar, S. Bonakdar, Y. Ganji, N. Mirjordavi, S. A. Ghavimi, P. Khashayar

Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

Bone Tissue Engineering (BTE) Composed of Three Main Parts: Scaffold, Cells and Signaling Factors. Several Materials and Composites Are Suggested as a Scaffold for BTE. Biocompatibility is One of the Most Important Property of a BTE Scaffold. in This Work Synthesis of a Novel Nanocomposite Including Layered Double Hydroxides (LDH) and Gelatin is Carried Out and its Biological Properties Were Studied. the Co-Precipitation (PH=11) Method Was Used to Prepare the LDH Powder, using Calcium Nitrate, Magesium Nitrate and Aluminum Nitrate Salts as Starting Materials. the Resulted Precipitates Were Dried. X-Ray Diffraction (XRD), Fourier Transform Infrared Spectroscopy (FTIR) and Scanning Electron …

Effects Of Beverage Colorants And Accelerated Aging On The Color Stability Of Indirect Resin Composites, Sakineh Nikzad, Abbas Azari, Mohsen Poursina

Journal of Dental Sciences

Abstract Background/purpose Discoloration of resin-based restorations is considered a common obstacle in restorative dentistry. Several studies assessed the color stability of direct resin composites; however, little is known regarding indirect/laboratory composite resins (ICRs). The purpose of this study was to investigate the color stability of two ICRs (Gradia, Gradia, GC Dental Products) and (SR-Adoro, SR Adoro, Ivoclar Vivadent) compared to a feldspathic porcelain (Ceramco II, DENTSPLY Ceramco) following immersion in different beverages or subjected to accelerated aging. Materials and methods Using a machine-made metal mold, 20 disc samples (10 mm in diameter and 2 mm thick) were fabricated from each …

Inhibitory Effects Of Di- O -Demethylcurcumin On Interleukin-1Β-Induced Interleukin-6 Production From Human Gingival Fibroblasts, Nuntana Aroonrerk, Chatchawan Changtam, Kanyawim Kirtikara, Apichart Suksamrarn

Journal of Dental Sciences

Abstract Background/purpose Curcumin is a polyphenolic phytochemical isolated from the medicinal plant Curcuma longa L. This phytochemical exhibits anti-inflammatory and antioxidant properties. The aim of this study was to find a curcuminoid compound that has a better effect on the suppression of interleukin-1β (IL-1β)-induced IL-6 production than curcumin in human gingival fibroblasts (HGFs). Materials and methods The parent curcuminoids 1 – 3 were isolated from the rhizomes of C. longa and 17 curcuminoid analogs 4 – 20 were synthesized from the parent curcuminoids. The condition for IL-6 production by HGFs after inducing the cells with IL-1β was optimized. HGFs were …

Effect Of Corrosive Environments And Thermocycling On The Attractive Force Of Four Types Of Dental Magnetic Attachments, Hakan Akin, Ali Kemal Ozdemir

Journal of Dental Sciences

Abstract Background/purpose One of the problems that has limited magnets’ wide acceptance by clinicians is their low corrosion resistance. The purpose of this study was to determine the effect of corrosive environments and thermocycling on the attractive force of different types of new generation magnetic attachments. Materials and methods We measured the attractive forces of 60 magnetic attachment systems (Hyper slim, Hicorex slim, Dyna, and Steco) with a universal test machine. We then immersed 40 of the magnetic attachment systems in two media, namely, 1% lactic acid solution (pH 2.3), and 0.9% NaCl solution (pH 7.3). The remaining magnetic attachments …

Journalism Education And Children's Rights: New Approaches To Media Development In Cee/Cis Countries, Michael Foley, Noirin Hayes, Brian O'Neill

Articles

This article gives the background to a project entitled Children's Rights and Journalism Practice, which was carried out for UNICEF in university journalism faculties in CEE/CIS countries

By focusing on journalism in the context of the academy and raising awareness of children’s rights from a journalistic perspective, the project seeks to provide a relatively safe space for critical engagement with journalistic ethics and values. Children are targets of, or are implicated in, nearly all aspects of public policy, yet are largely invisible in news-media coverage, and rarely have their voices heard in matters affecting them. By using the UNCRC as …