Digital Commons Network^™

Representasi Tindak Tutur Calon Gubernur Sulawesi Selatan: Analisis Wacana Kesopanan Berbahasa, Yusri Yusri, Yuni Handayani, Riskawati Riskawati

Makara Human Behavior Studies in Asia

The research looks into the Governor Candidate of South Sulawesi’s representation of speech acts leading up to the governor’s election in 2013, in particular into politeness and the relation between cultural speech acts in South Sulawesi society and universal politeness maxim. The research is qualitative with pragmatic approach. This research uses written data from the utterances of the South Sulawesi’s incumbent Governors printed in the biggest mass media in South Sulawesi—Harian Fajar and Tribun Timur—for 4 months, in April, May, June, and July. The data, in the form of utterances produced by the politicians, are analyzed based on maxims that …

An Overview Of The Schwartz Theory Of Basic Values, Shalom H. Schwartz

Online Readings in Psychology and Culture

This article presents an overview of the Schwartz theory of basic human values. It discusses the nature of values and spells out the features that are common to all values and what distinguishes one value from another. The theory identifies ten basic personal values that are recognized across cultures and explains where they come from. At the heart of the theory is the idea that values form a circular structure that reflects the motivations each value expresses. This circular structure, that captures the conflicts and compatibility among the ten values is apparently culturally universal. The article elucidates the psychological principles …

Immunoproteomics: The Key To Discovery Of New Vaccine Antigens Against Bacterial Respiratory Infections, Ruth Dennehy, Siobhan Mcclean

Articles

The increase in antibiotic resistance and the shortage of new antimicrobials to prevent difficult bacterial infections underlines the importance of prophylactic therapies to prevent infection by bacterial pathogens. Vaccination has reduced the incidence of many serious diseases, including respiratory bacterial infections. However, there are many pathogens for which no vaccine is available and some vaccines are not effective among all age groups or among immunocompromised individuals. Immunoproteomics is a powerful technique which has been used to identify potential vaccine candidates to protect against pathogenic bacteria. The combination of proteomics with the detection of immunoreactive antigens using serum highlights immunogenic proteins …

Serving Clientele With Disabilities: An Assessment Of Texas Fcs Agents' Needs For Implementing Inclusive Programs, Rick L. Peterson, Cheryl Grenwelge, Michael R. Benz, Dalun Zhang, J. Aaron Resch, Geraldo Mireles, Lakshmi Mahadevan

Journal of Extension

This article reports on a qualitative study to assess Texas Family Consumer Science (FCS) Extension professionals' experiences working with individuals with disabilities and their perceived skills in promoting and delivering inclusive educational programming for this audience. Study results indicate that overall Extension educators viewed inclusive programming for individuals with disabilities as favorable but also reported a number of barriers to successfully implement inclusive programs. Educators' most pressing needs included: professional development in the area of disability, inclusive educational strategies and support funds for necessary accommodations. Implications for promoting and delivering inclusive educational programming for communities are addressed.

Will Extension Survive? Oklahoma Cooperative Extension Service Employees' Perceptions Of Adopter Attributes Of Extension, Xianyan Xu, Kathleen D. Kelsey

Journal of Extension

eXtension was introduced in 2008 as an innovation to rekindle public interest in Extension. The founders forecasted a 75% adoption rate within 1 year. However, adoptions rates have been much lower than expected. The study reported here investigated eight perceived adopter attributes (relative advantage, compatibility, trialability, visibility, ease of use, result demonstrability, image, and voluntariness) of eXtension among Oklahoma Extension employees to identify threats to adoption. Findings indicated that Extension employees generally held negative views of all eight attributes of the innovation. Without profound changes to the innovation and process of adoption, eXtension risks failure in this state.

Going The Distance Part 1: Three Keys To Successfully Delivering An Extension Course At A Distance, Heidi B. Rader

Journal of Extension

Distance learning is common in most segments of education, and the body of knowledge is extensive. Extension can apply much of this research but uniquely educates students whose presence is voluntary. The literature suggests that successful distance-delivered Extension courses share three characteristics: course content is high quality, demand is high for the course, and the distance-delivery method is satisfactory. More studies are needed to better assess the efficacy of specific distance-delivery methods in an Extension setting, but these three keys can be used to decide whether or not to deliver a course using distance delivery.

Singapore Inflation Expectations: Expecting The Unexpected, Aurobindo Ghosh, Jun Yu

Research Collection School Of Economics

The study of inflation expectations of Singapore house-holds is a multi-disciplinary industry-relevant research that comes out of a partnership between Singapore Management University (SMU) and MasterCard. The research team for this MasterCard-SKBI Singapore Index of Inflation Expectations (SInDEx) project applied rigorous methods using current internet-based marketing survey tools for data-collection and advanced econometric techniques to analyse the data. The updates from the quarterly waves are keenly followed by policymakers, market watchers and the media because of the enormous importance of cost of living to individuals and businesses alike.

Money And Asset Prices With Uninsurable Risks, Nicolas L. Jacquet, Serene Tan

Research Collection School Of Economics

We develop a model where the coexistence of money and a higher yielding asset is endogenously obtained when no restriction is placed on the use of either object as a medium of exchange. Due to the presence of uninsurable risks, agents have, in equilibrium, di⁄erent relative valuations of the asset to money, and hence, the use of money as a means of payment is strictly preferred. This endogenous di⁄erence in the willingness of agents to use money over the asset implies that money carries a greater liquidity premium than the asset. We obtain that the asset strictly dominates money in …

Fiberoptic Intubation In A Paediatric Patient With Severe Temporomandibular Joint (Tmj) Ankylosis, Ali Asghar, Faisal Shamim, Asiyah Aman

Department of Anaesthesia

Craniofacial abnormalities are associated with mandibular hypoplasia, reduced mandibular space with overcrowding of soft tissues and maxillary hypoplasia. Decreased mouth opening and limitation in jaw protrusion are independent predictors of difficult airway in such patients. The relative difficult problem becomes even graver in the paediatric age group because of their small mouth opening and un-cooperativeness. A child with severe temporomandibular joint (TMJ) ankylosis presented with negligible mouth opening and required surgical correction under general anaesthesia. Successful intubation was performed with endotracheal tube size 5.5 mm using an adult 4.3 mm fiberoptic bronchoscope under inhalational as well as topical anaesthesia.

Parries To Parental Involvement In Kindergarten Activities From Perspective Of Kindergarten’S School Administration And Teachers In Al Ain, Shamsa Sultan Obaid Sultan Al Dhaheri

Theses

The current study aims at analyzing parental involvement barriers in kindergarten (KG) activities from the perception of school administration and teachers in AI-Ain Kindergartens. It identified, examined and analyzed the school administration and teacher perceptions on barriers that hinder parental involvement in kindergarten activities. A special focus had been paid to obstacles that prevent parents from participating in kindergarten activities based on four categories that included factors related to regulations, administration, teachers and parents. This study used a survey questionnaire to gain its data targeting a sample population of 329 respondents that includes all the teachers and administrators of Al …

Policy-Making Under Evo Morales: Explaining Ethnopopulist Redistributive Measures In Bolivia, Luis Ferreira

Graduate Program in International Studies Theses & Dissertations

The Evo Morales administration has radically transformed the Bolivian state since his election in 2005. As a result of Morales' indigenous identity and overt ethnic tensions in this state, there is a perception that this factor plays a decisive role in Bolivia's policymaking. However, as the 'renegotiation' of the hydrocarbon industry in 2006 demonstrates, ethnopopulism and political survival provide the most comprehensive approach to predicting the policies of the current Bolivian government.

The resistance to liberalization efforts, the success of redistributive measures and the role identity has had in Bolivia explains why this approach to policy-making has allowed Morales to …

Creativity And Thinking Skills Integrated Into A Science Enrichment Unit On Flooding, Audrey C. Rule, Jean Suchsland Schneider, Denise A. Tallakson, Diane Highnam

Curriculum & Instruction Faculty Publications

Floods that used to happen every hundred years are now occurring more frequently. Human influences on the damage inflicted by flooding need to be well-understood by future voters and property-owners. Therefore, the timely topic of flooding was used as the focus of a special multi-grade enrichment short course taught by two university education professors for 26 preK-8th grade high-achieving and creative students. During the course, students listened to guest speakers (city council member, meteorologist, and environmentalist), watched two flood-related videos, read books on floods, viewed electronic presentations related to dams and recent floods, discussed causes, effects, and mitigations of flooding, …

Insights From Characterizing Extinct Human Gut Microbiomes, Raul Y. Tito, Dan Knights, Jessica Metcalf, Alexandra J. Obregon-Tito, Lauren Cleeland, Fares Najar, Bruce Roe, Karl Reinhard, Kristin Sobolik, Samuel Belknap, Morris Foster, Paul Spicer, Rob Knight, Cecil M. Lewis, Jr.

School of Natural Resources: Faculty Publications

In an effort to better understand the ancestral state of the human distal gut microbiome, we examine feces retrieved from archaeological contexts (coprolites). To accomplish this, we pyrosequenced the 16S rDNA V3 region from duplicate coprolite samples recovered from three archaeological sites, each representing a different depositional environment: Hinds Cave (~8000 years B.P.) in the southern United States, Caserones (1600 years B.P.) in northern Chile, and Rio Zape in northern Mexico (1400 years B.P.). Clustering algorithms grouped samples from the same site. Phyletic representation was more similar within sites than between them. A Bayesian approach to source-tracking was used to …

Effect Of Business Intelligence And It Infrastructure Flexibility On Organizational Agility, Xiaofeng Chen, Keng Siau

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

There is a growing use of business intelligence (BI) for better management decisions in different industries. However, empirical studies on BI are still scarce in academic research. This research investigates BI from an organizational agility perspective. Organizational agility is the ability to sense and respond to market opportunities and threats with speed. Drawing on systems theory and literature on organizational agility, business intelligence, and IT infrastructure flexibility, we hypothesize that BI use and IT infrastructure flexibility are two major antecedents to organizational agility. We developed a research model to examine the effect of BI use and IT infrastructure flexibility on …

Investigating Intelligent Agents In A 3d Virtual World, Yilin Kang, Fiona Fui-Hoon Nah, Ah-Hwee Tan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Web 3.0 involves "intelligent" web applications that utilize natural language processing, machine-based learning and reasoning, and intelligent techniques to analyze and understand user behavior. In this research, we empirically assess a specific form of Web 3.0 application in the form of intelligent agents that offer assistance to users in the virtual world. Using media naturalness theory, we hypothesize that the use of intelligent agents in the virtual world can enhance user experience by offering a more natural way of communication and assistance to users. We are interested to test if media naturalness theory holds in the context of intelligent agents …

Agent-Based Virtual Humans In Co-Space: An Evaluative Study, Yilin Kang, Ah-Hwee Tan, Fiona Fui-Hoon Nah

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Co-Space refers to interactive virtual environment modelled after the real world in terms of look-and-feel, functionalities and services. We have developed a 3D virtual world named Nan yang Technological University (NTU) Co-Space populated with virtual human characters. Three key requirements of realistic virtual humans in the virtual world have been identified, namely (1) autonomy: agents can function on their own, (2) interactivity: agents can interact naturally with players, and (3) personality: agents can exhibit human traits and characteristics. Working towards these challenges, we propose a brain-inspired agent architecture that integrates goal-directed autonomy, natural language interaction and human-like personality. We conducted …

Fame, Soft Flock Formation Control For Collective Behavior Studies And Rapid Games Development, Choon Sing Ho, Yew-Soon Ong, Xianshun Chen, Ah-Hwee Tan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We present FAME, a comprehensive C# software library package providing soft formation control for large flocks of agents. While many existing available libraries provide means to create flocks of agent equipped with simple steering behavior, none so far, to the best of our knowledge, provides an easy and hassle free approach to control the formation of the flock. Here, besides the basic flocking mechanisms, FAME provides an extensive range of advanced features that gives enhanced soft formation control over multiple flocks. These soft formation features include defining flocks in any user-defined formation, automated self-organizing agent within formation, manipulating formation shape …

Semi-Automated Verification Of Defense Against Sql Injection In Web Applications, Kaiping Liu, Hee Beng Kuan Tan, Lwin Khin Shar

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Recent reports reveal that majority of the attacks to Web applications are input manipulation attacks. Among these attacks, SQL injection attack malicious input is submitted to manipulate the database in a way that was unintended by the applications' developers is one such attack. This paper proposes an approach for assisting to code verification process on the defense against SQL injection. The approach extracts all such defenses implemented in code. With the use of the proposed approach, developers, testers or auditors can then check the defenses extracted from code to verify their adequacy. We have evaluated the feasibility, effectiveness, and usefulness …

Semiochemicals From Herbivory Induced Cotton Plants Enhance The Foraging Behavior Of The Cotton Boll Weevil, Anthonomus Grandis, D. M. Magalhães, M. Borges, R. A. Laumann, E. R. Sujii, P. Mayon, J. C. Caulfield, C. A.O. Midega, Z. R. Khan, J. A. Pickett, M. A. Birkett, M. C. Blassioli-Moraes

All Peer-Reviewed Publications

The boll weevil, Anthonomus grandis, has been monitored through deployment of traps baited with aggregation pheromone components. However, field studies have shown that the number of insects caught in these traps is significantly reduced during cotton squaring, suggesting that volatiles produced by plants at this phenological stage may be involved in attraction. Here, we evaluated the chemical profile of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) emitted by undamaged or damaged cotton plants at different phenological stages, under different infestation conditions, and determined the attractiveness of these VOCs to adults of A. grandis. In addition, we investigated whether or not VOCs released by …

Elucidation Of The Biosynthesis Of The Di-C-Glycosylflavone Isoschaftoside, An Allelopathic Component From Desmodium Spp. That Inhibits Striga Spp. Development, Mary L. Hamilton, Serge P. Kuate, Melissa Brazier-Hicks, John C. Caulfield, Ruth Rose, Robert Edwards, Baldwyn Torto, John A. Pickett, Antony M. Hooper

All Peer-Reviewed Publications

Isoschaftoside, an allelopathic di-C-glycosylflavone from Desmodium spp. root exudates, is biosynthesised through sequential glucosylation and arabinosylation of 2-hydroxynaringenin with UDP-glucose and UDP-arabinose. Complete conversion to the flavone requires chemical dehydration implying a dehydratase enzyme has a role in vivo to complete the biosynthesis. The C-glucosyltransferase has been partially characterised and its activity demonstrated in highly purified fractions. © 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

China's Rare Earths Export Quotas: Out Of The China-Raw Materials Gate, But Past The Wto's Finish Line?, Han-Wei Liu, John Maughan

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

Several recent studies have discussed the ramifications of the China – Raw Materials case for China's rare earths. However, none of these studies has conducted a thorough investigation of China's current export quota regime for rare earths or how it might stand up under WTO rules, assuming that it would be treated the same. This article makes no such assumption, investigating China's export quota regime for rare earths as it stands in early June 2012. The regime is somewhat improved over that applied during the Raw Materials case and could allow a more favourable WTO ruling. However, if General Agreement …

Finding Thoughtful Comments From Social Media, Gottipati Swapna, Jing Jiang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Online user comments contain valuable user opinions. Comments vary greatly in quality and detecting high quality comments is a subtask of opinion mining and summarization research. Finding attentive comments that provide some reasoning is highly valuable in understanding the user’s opinion particularly in sociopolitical opinion mining and aids policy makers, social organizations or government sectors in decision making. In this paper we study the problem of detecting thoughtful comments. We empirically study various textual features, discourse relations and relevance features to predict thoughtful comments. We use logistic regression model and test on the datasets related to sociopolitical content. We found …

Do Hackers Seek Variety? An Empirical Analysis Of Website Defacements, Kok Wei Ooi, Seung-Hyun Kim, Qiu-Hong Wang, Kai Lung Hui

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The importance of securing the cyberspace is higher than ever along with the evolution of cyber attacks launched by hackers with malicious intention. However, there has been little research to understand the hackers who are the most important agents determining the landscape of information security. This paper investigates the behaviors of hackers using a longitudinal dataset of defacement attacks. Based on theories of economics of criminal behaviors and variety seeking, we find that hackers seek variety in choosing their victims in terms of region, hacking method, and the type of operating systems; as their prior experience is focused in terms …

A Mechanism For Organizing Last-Mile Service Using Non-Dedicated Fleet, Shih-Fen Cheng, Duc Thien Nguyen, Hoong Chuin Lau

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Unprecedented pace of urbanization and rising income levels have fueled the growth of car ownership in almost all newly formed megacities. Such growth has congested the limited road space and significantly affected the quality of life in these megacities. Convincing residents to give up their cars and use public transport is the most effective way in reducing congestion; however, even with sufficient public transport capacity, the lack of last-mile (from the transport hub to the destination) travel services is the major deterrent for the adoption of public transport. Due to the dynamic nature of such travel demands, fixed-size fleets will …

On Recommending Hashtags In Twitter Networks, Su Mon Kywe, Tuan-Anh Hoang, Ee Peng Lim, Feida Zhu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Twitter network is currently overwhelmed by massive amount of tweets generated by its users. To effectively organize and search tweets, users have to depend on appropriate hashtags inserted into tweets. We begin our research on hashtags by first analyzing a Twitter dataset generated by more than 150,000 Singapore users over a three-month period. Among several interesting findings about hashtag usage by this user community, we have found a consistent and significant use of new hashtags on a daily basis. This suggests that most hashtags have very short life span. We further propose a novel hashtag recommendation method based on collaborative …

Extracting And Normalizing Entity-Actions From Users' Comments, Swapna Gottipati, Jing Jiang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

With the growing popularity of opinion-rich resources on the Web, new opportunities and challenges arise and aid people in actively using such information to understand the opinions of others. Opinion mining process currently focuses on extracting the sentiments of the users on products, social, political and economical issues. In many instances, users not only express their sentiments but also contribute their ideas, requests and suggestions through comments. Such comments are useful for domain experts and are referred to as actionable content. Extracting actionable knowledge from online social media has attracted a growing interest from both academia and the industry. We …

Reputation As Public Policy For Internet Security: A Field Study, Qian Tang, Leigh L. Linden, John S. Quarterman, Andrew Whinston

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Cybersecurity is a national priority in this big data era. Because of the lack of incentives and the existence of negative externality, companies often underinvest in addressing security risks and accidents, despite government and industry recommendations. In the present article, we propose a method that utilizes reputation through information disclosure to motivate companies to behave pro-socially, improving their Internet security. Using outbound spam as a proxy for Internet security, we conducted a quasiexperimental field study for eight countries through SpamRankings.net. This outgoingspam-based study shows that information disclosure on outgoing spam can help reduce outgoing spam, approximately by 16 percent. This …

Structural And Functional Analysis Of Multi-Interface Domains, Liang Zhao, Steven C. H. Hoi, Limsoon Wong, Tobias Hamp, Jinyan Li

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

A multi-interface domain is a domain that can shape multiple and distinctive binding sites to contact with many other domains, forming a hub in domain-domain interaction networks. The functions played by the multiple interfaces are usually different, but there is no strict bijection between the functions and interfaces as some subsets of the interfaces play the same function. This work applies graph theory and algorithms to discover fingerprints for the multiple interfaces of a domain and to establish associations between the interfaces and functions, based on a huge set of multi-interface proteins from PDB. We found that about 40% of …

An Automated Pathological Class Level Annotation System For Volumetric Brain Images, Thien Anh Dinh, Tomi Silander, C. C. Tchoyoson Lim, Tze-Yun Leong

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We introduce an automated, pathological class level annotation system for medical volumetric brain images. While much of the earlier work has mainly focused on annotating regions of interest in medical images, our system does not require annotated region level training data nor assumes perfect segmentation results for the regions of interest; the time and effort needed for acquiring training data are hence significantly reduced. This capability of handling high-dimensional noisy data, however, poses additional technical challenges, since statistical estimation of models for such data is prone to over-fitting. We propose a framework that combines a regularized logistic regression method and …

The Structure Of Strategy-Proof Random Social Choice Functions Over Product Domains And Lexicographically Separable Preferences, Shurojit Chatterji, Souvik Roy, Arunava Sen

Research Collection School Of Economics

We characterize the class of dominant-strategy incentive-compatible (or strategy-proof) random social choice functions in the standard multi-dimensional voting model where voter preferences over the various dimensions (or components) are lexicographically separable. We show that these social choice functions (which we call generalized random dictatorships) are induced by probability distributions on voter sequences of length equal to the number of components. They induce a fixed probability distribution on the product set of voter peaks. The marginal probability distribution over every component is a random dictatorship. Our results generalize the classic random dictatorship result in Gibbard (1977) and the decomposability results for …