Digital Commons Network^™

Understanding How College Students' Literacy Is Affected By Texting Sms Lexicon, Katherine L. Herrman

Master's Theses or Doctor of Nursing Practice

Spelling and grammar have always been taught in schools as means of proper language mechanics (U.S.D.E., 2006). Recently, the use of correct spelling and proper grammar in writing among college students has seemed to weaken (Junco & Cotton, 2011). Although there may be many factors that could contribute to this decrease in proper language use, the development of new technologies may be playing an important role. Presently, one of the newest technologies, cell phones, is in the hands of many young adults. Most of these young adults are using their cell phones to send and receive instant messages, or text …

Burrowing Owl (Athene Cunicularia) Nesting Ecology In Western Kansas, Carol D. Grover-Mariner

Master's Theses or Doctor of Nursing Practice

The Burrowing Owl (Athene cunicularia) is a common occupant of Smoky Valley Ranch located in Logan County, Kansas, where the abundance of black-tailed prairie dog (Cynomys ludovicianus) burrows provides ideal habitat for the Burrowing Owl. The objectives of the study were to 1) estimate the densities of black-tailed prairie dog colonies through visual counts, 2) estimate nesting success and nest survival probabilities of the Burrowing Owl with the use of a burrow camera, and 3) estimate post-fledging dispersal and return rate of juvenile Burrowing Owl the following season. I located 96 potential nests from 24 March through 2 July 2007 …

Nebline, November/December 2012

NEBLINE Newsletter Archive from Nebraska Extension in Lancaster County

Feature: Co-Parenting For Successful Kids Online Class Has Great Response in First Year

Farm Views

Urban Agriculture

Food & Fitness

Home & Family Living

Horticulture

Environmental Focus

4-H & Youth

Community Focus

Extension Calendar

Nutrition Education Program

Family and Community Education (FCE) Clubs

and other extension news and events

Emu Today, November 1, 2012, Eastern Michigan University

EMU Today

No abstract provided.

Ink (2012-11)

Ink, 2008-

The student-run features magazine covering the fashion, art, music and culture worlds at VCU and in Richmond. Published annually in print and updated regularly online.

Transport Of Engineered Nanomaterials In Porous Media: Groundwater Remediation Application And Effects Of Particle Shape, Megan Seymour

Department of Environmental Engineering: Theses and Other Student Research

Nanotechnology, referring to any science which utilizes particles at the nanoscale, has substantially grown in recent years for its wide spectrum of potential uses. Many theories and models have been developed around the transport of spherical particles; however nanoparticles can be found in various shapes which could greatly affect the predicted transport and retention in the subsurface.

This research explores the beneficial use of carbon nano-onions (CNOs) for environmental remediation and investigates the transport of CNOs in saturated porous media. Surface oxidized CNOs possessed 10 times higher sorption capacity compared to C₆₀ for heavy metal ions including Pb^{2+ …}

The Effect Of School Wide Positive Behavior Support, William Royal

Doctoral Dissertations and Projects

This study investigated the effect of the implementation of a School Wide Positive Behavior Support (SWPBS) Program on teacher morale. This quantitative study used the Perdue Teacher Opinionaire (PTO) to survey the faculties for two rural, Title I middle schools in Tennessee. Middle School 1 implemented the SWPBS program. Middle School 2 was the control group. The surveys were given to each school's faculty before implementation and after implementation at Middle School 1. The study examined the changes in the opinions of the two faculties for each of seven factors, rapport with the principal, satisfaction with teaching, salary, teaching load, …

Rhode Island School Terrorist Attack Preparedness, Michael Dube

Doctoral Dissertations and Projects

This study examined the state of safety and terrorist attack preparedness in Rhode Island Schools as determined by Rhode Island school leader perceptions. The study is descriptive in nature as it gathers data to describe a particular event or situation. Using a researcher generated survey based on terrorist preparedness guidelines and suggestions in part from the Department of Homeland Security (2007), U.S. Department of Education (2007), National School Safety Center (2005), and National Association of School Resource Officers (2005), Rhode Island school administrators were asked to use a Likert rating scale to indicate levels of agreement with accepted terrorist preparedness …

The Effect Of Voice Thread® Integration On High School Students' Anxiety And Oral Proficiency In The Foreign Language Classroom, Melanie Dunn

Doctoral Dissertations and Projects

The purpose of this study was to examine the effect of the asynchronous voice-conferencing technology, Voice Thread ®, on the anxiety and oral proficiency of high school students in their third year of studying Spanish as a foreign language. In this quasi-experimental study students' foreign language anxiety levels and oral proficiency were examined to determine if a difference existed based on the type of practice used. The treatment group used Voice Thread ® to practice speaking. The control group used the traditional method of the language laboratory to practice speaking. The Foreign Language Classroom Anxiety Scale (FLCAS) was used to …

Snap-And-Ask: Answering Multimodal Question By Naming Visual Instance, Wei Zhang, Lei Pang, Chong-Wah Ngo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In real-life, it is easier to provide a visual cue when asking a question about a possibly unfamiliar topic, for example, asking the question, “Where was this crop circle found?”. Providing an image of the instance is far more convenient than texting a verbose description of the visual properties, especially when the name of the query instance is not known. Nevertheless, having to identify the visual instance before processing the question and eventually returning the answer makes multimodal question-answering technically challenging. This paper addresses the problem of visual-totext naming through the paradigm of answering-by-search in a two-stage computational framework, which …

Mining Coherent Anomaly Collections On Web Data, Hanbo Dai, Feida Zhu, Ee-Peng Lim, Hwee Hwa Pang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The recent boom of weblogs and social media has attached increasing importance to the identification of suspicious users with unusual behavior, such as spammers or fraudulent reviewers. A typical spamming strategy is to employ multiple dummy accounts to collectively promote a target, be it a URL or a product. Consequently, these suspicious accounts exhibit certain coherent anomalous behavior identifiable as a collection. In this paper, we propose the concept of Coherent Anomaly Collection (CAC) to capture this kind of collections, and put forward an efficient algorithm to simultaneously find the top-K disjoint CACs together with their anomalous behavior patterns. Compared …

Impact Of Multimedia In Sina Weibo: Popularity And Life Span, Xun Zhao, Feida Zhu, Weining Qian, Aoying Zhou

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Multimedia contents such as images and videos are widely used in social network sites nowadays. Sina Weibo, a Chinese microblogging service, is one of the first microblog platforms to incorporate multimedia content sharing features. This work provides statistical analysis on how multimedia contents are produced, consumed, and propagated in Sina Weibo. Based on 230 million tweets and 1.8 million user profiles in Sina Weibo, we study the impact of multimedia contents on the popularity of both users and tweets as well as tweet life span. Our preliminary study shows that multimedia tweets dominant pure text ones in SinaWeibo. Multimedia contents …

Postcritical Theory? Demanding The Possible, Jeff Pruchnic

English Faculty Research Publications

Walled States, Waning Sovereignty by Wendy Brown. (New York: Zone, 2010. Pp. 168, 10 illustrations. $25.95 cloth.)

Cosmopolitics I by Isabelle Stengers. Translated by Robert Bononno. (Posthumanities Series, 9. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010. Pp. 310. $75.00 cloth; $25.00 paper.)

Fanaticism: On the Uses of an Idea by Alberto Toscano. (London: Verso, 2010. Pp. 304. $26.95 cloth.)

Envisioning Real Utopias by Erik Olin Wright. (London: Verso, 2010. Pp. 288/416. $95 cloth; $26.95 paper.)

Chanticleer | Vol 61, Issue 10, Jacksonville State University

Chanticleer

No abstract provided.

The Cowl - V.77 - N.8 - Nov 1, 2012

The Cowl

The Cowl - student newspaper of Providence College. Vol 77 - No. 8 - November 1, 2012. 24 pages.

Law As A Profession: Examining The Role Of Accountability, Susan Saab Fortney

Faculty Scholarship

In asserting that law is a profession, not a business, lawyers often refer to the role that self-governance plays in the legal profession. Julius Henry Cohen captured this sentiment in the following exhortation: “Ours is a profession...The sins of one of us are the sins of all of us.” Come, brethren, let us clean house.” Meaningful self-governance requires accountable and independent professionals. This article tackles accountability as fundamental aspects of professionalism. The examination of accountability considers fissures in accountability as demonstrated in lawyers’ rush to jump on the limited liability bandwagon and resistance to mandatory legal malpractice insurance and insurance …

Local Government Law, Andrew R. Mcroberts, Steven V. Durbin

University of Richmond Law Review

No abstract provided.

Lawyering In The Christian Colony: Some Hauerwasian Themes, Reflections, And Questions , W. Bradley Wendel

Law and Contemporary Problems

No abstract provided.

Restrictive State And Local Immigration Laws: Solutions In Search Of Problems, Pratheepan Gulasekaram, Karthick Ramakrishnan

Faculty Publications

In the Issue Brief, the authors demonstrate that conventional understandings of why states and localities pass restrictive immigration laws do not hold up under empirical analysis. Rather, the data from their nationwide study of 50 states and over 25,000 local jurisdictions show that “what most subfederal jurisdictions with immigration enforcement laws share is not economic stress or overconsumption of public goods or heightened violent crime, but rather a partisan composition within their legislative and executive branches that is highly receptive to enforcement heavy proposals.” These laws are not, as some have contended, organic local responses to inaction at the federal …

Black And White: A Path Toward Clarity For Copyright Law And Gray Market Goods, Robert A. Paul

DePaul Journal of Art, Technology & Intellectual Property Law

No abstract provided.

Facial Feature Point Fitting With Combined Color And Depth Information For Interactive Displays, Colin Bellmore

Theses

Interactive displays are driven by natural interaction with the user, necessitating a computer system that recognizes body gestures and facial expressions. User inputs are not easily or reliably recognized for a satisfying user experience, as the complexities of human communication are difficult to interpret in real-time. Recognizing facial expressions in particular is a problem that requires high-accuracy and efficiency for stable interaction environments. The recent availability of the Kinect, a low cost, low resolution sensor that supplies simultaneous color and depth images, provides a breakthrough opportunity to enhance the interactive capabilities of displays and overall user experience. This new RGBD …

The Soulless Machine, Nathan Lomas

Theses

Since their creation, we have grown increasingly reliant on machines to aid us in our understanding and perceptions of the world - the camera is no exception. As an extension of the human eye, it allows us the opportunity to examine our environments from new perspectives, offering up views that we may not be able to witness on our own. Though in truth, the structure of the machine is ingrained in everything we know: from the natural world to our social patterns, actions are prescribed, parts move with united purpose, yet there is a certain comfort in the surrender of …

What Studios Do, Eliot Bates

Publications and Research

This essay is focused around a seemingly simple question – what do recording studios do? First, a clarification. I am not primarily asking “what are studios” or “what do people do in studios,” two comparatively straightforward questions that are tangentially addressed in academic and trade writing. Rather, I wish to consider some of the ways in which the studio itself shapes the kinds of social and musical performances and interactions that transpire within. I contend that studios must be understood simultaneously as acoustic environments, as meeting places, as container technologies, as a system of constraints on vision, sound and mobility, …

Ssocial Norms In A New Media Environment: Influence On The Perceived Salience Of Climate Change, James T. Spartz, Dominique Brossard, Sharon Dunwoody, Robert J. Griffin

College of Communication Faculty Research and Publications

This online experiment explores how cues embedded in social-networking channels such as YouTube can influence individuals’ perceptions of public opinion regarding large social issues such as climate change. Using a simple cue, the number of views listed under a YouTube video, we examine how a high or low number of views might influence viewers’ perceptions about how “others” feel regarding climate change. Results suggest that social cues in the online environment can act similarly to cues in the off-line world by influencing perceptions of public opinion. Discussion focuses on how thought-leaders might consider the influential role of social norm perceptions …

The Mystery Spot, Joe Arcovitch

Theses

Mystery Spot is a graduate thesis film that tells the story of a sorceress who has grown bored with her daily routine and disinterested in her magical abilities; significant though they may be. She seeks answers outside herself, feeling that the life and 'powers' outside her own are more interesting and more powerful. She discovers things aren't always as they seem. Other powers can come at a price and other lives are not necessarily so good. She returns home with a renewed interest and appreciation for what she has. The final film is a mixed media 2D/3D using Maya, Adobe …

Podification: Horatio And The Metamorphosis Mystery, Daniel Driscoll

Theses

The animated film, Podification: Horatio and the Metamorphosis Mystery is the tale of a caterpillar, Horatio, who is faced with what could be the final moments of his life. The story tells the end of his journey and his interactions with his few remaining friends. The film was created using Autodesk Maya, Adobe Creative Suite and edited using Final Cut Pro. The intention of the film was to create a small world, populate it with a broad range of characters, and communicate the central narrative theme which encompassed change, the unknown, and the uncertainties we all face in our own …

Evolutionary Star-Structured Heterogeneous Data Co-Clustering, Amit Salunke

Theses

A star-structured interrelationship, which is a more common type in real world data, has a central object connected to the other types of objects. One of the key challenges in evolutionary clustering is integration of historical data in current data. Traditionally, smoothness in data transition over a period of time is achieved by means of cost functions defined over historical and current data. These functions provide a tunable tolerance for shifts of current data accounting instance to all historical information for corresponding instance. Once historical data is integrated into current data using cost functions, co-clustering is obtained using various co-clustering …

A Practical Study Of The Problems Of Current Internet Routing Tables, Arnav Ghosh

Theses

The phenomenal growth of the Internet seems to amaze even the creators of this worldwide network. Apart from the constantly changing data protocols and services which the Internet has to adapt to; the sheer volume of users has been one of the biggest challenges which the Internet is coping with. This thesis is directed towards the study of Internet scale routing tables in a lab environment to understand the dynamics of route processing by routers and the effect of increasing number of routing table entries on the overall performance of the network. This study is an effort to simulate an …

Characterization Of Color, Gloss And Mechanical Performance Of 3d Printed Structures, Hrushikesh Godbole

Theses

The demand for customized products is on a rise. As such, there is a great need for methods to efficiently satisfy this need for customization. Rapid prototyping, also known as 3D printing, is a technology that enables economic production of customized low volume products and enables expedited product development cycles. Given the importance of color as a means to differentiate products generated through 3D printing processes, accurate color reproduction is essential for broad market acceptance. Color reproduction in 2D document printing is itself a complex science; achieving similar results in 3D printing will require significant research. This research work explores …

Marketing Strategies For Organic And Natural Meat Producers, Kynda Curtis, Shane Feuz, Nelissa Aybar

All Current Publications

In-person consumer surveys concerning meat consumption preferences and willingness to pay for specialty meat products were carried out in the fall of 2007 (Wang, Curtis, and Moeltner, 2011).