Digital Commons Network^™

Influence Of Motivation On The Efficacy Of Natural Family Planning, Richard J. Fehring, Mary Schneider, Mary Lee Barron, Jessica E. Pruszynski

Randomized Comparison of Two Internet-Supported Methods of Natural Family Planning

Purpose: Mutual motivation is recognized as essential for effective behavioral methods of family planning. Few studies have studied this factor in family planning efficacy. The purpose of this study was to determine the influence of mutual motivation on unintended pregnancy rates of couples who used natural family planning (NFP) methods to avoid pregnancy.

Study Design and Methods: Using an online taught NFP method, 358women and ( their male partners) indicated “how much” and “how hard” they wished to avoid pregnancy on a scale of 0-10 before each menstrual cycle charted over 12 month of use. This motivation scale is used …

The Curriculum For English Language Teacher Education In Australian And Vietnamese Universities, Minh Hue Nguyen

Australian Journal of Teacher Education

This paper examines the curricula for English language teacher education in two universities, one in Australia and the other in Vietnam. Specifically, it analyses the structures of the two curricula, compares and contrasts them, and examines how the development of the curricula was shaped by distinctive contextual factors. Sources of data include relevant literature, policy and curriculum documents, and interviews with curriculum developers from the two universities. Analysis of data revealed great variation across and within the two curricula in terms of structure and content. Findings also reveal specific contextual factors that influenced the development of the curricula. Although the …

Interim Editors' Introduction, Dr. Melanie O'Brien, Rafiki Ubaldo, Amy Fagin, Dr. Kjell Anderson

Genocide Studies and Prevention: An International Journal

No abstract provided.

Introduction, Daniel Feierstein

Genocide Studies and Prevention: An International Journal

No abstract provided.

Full Issue 8.1

Genocide Studies and Prevention: An International Journal

No abstract provided.

Narrative Strategies Of Post-Genocide Argentine Filmmaking: The Decade Of The 1980s, Lior Zylberman

Genocide Studies and Prevention: An International Journal

This work is part of a broader study. This article analyzes Argentine films about the genocide perpetrated by the country’s last military dictatorship (1976-1983). The focus is on the films produced during the 1980s, specifically those made between 1984 and 1989. Generally these films have been analyzed from an aesthetic perspective, or else from a chronological standpoint that connects their historical context to the design aspects of individual films, their mise-en-scène. Central to this latter approach has been what is termed a prevailing “theory of the two demons”. This approach is generally valid, however this article posits that in their …

Genocide On Trial: Case Note And Extracts Of "Circuito Camps" Judgment, María Belén Riveiro, Luciana Rosende, Lior Zylberman

Genocide Studies and Prevention: An International Journal

Since 2006, several Argentine courts have tried the crimes committed during the 1976 dictatorship. While in most countries these crimes are usually tried by International Tribunals or by Mixed Jurisdiction Tribunals, in Argentina national courts have been responsible of this task. We will analyze a judgment that considers that these crimes entail the commission of the crime of Genocide.

Author Biographies

Genocide Studies and Prevention: An International Journal

No abstract provided.

Review Of Proposed Plan For New Police And Fire Facilities, Carver, Ma, Edward J. Collins, Jr. Center For Public Management, University Of Massachusetts Boston

Edward J. Collins Center for Public Management Publications

The Edward J. Collins, Jr. Center for Public Management at the University of Massachusetts Boston was hired by the Town of Carver to perform an independent assessment of the Buildings Study Committee’s proposals for the construction/renovation of three new public facilities including a fire station, police station, and elementary school. Specifically, the team from the Center was asked to review: 1) the selected and considered sites for the facilities; and, 2) the funding plan recommended by the Buildings Study Committee.

This analysis has been divided into two components. This, first report presents the Center’s findings as they relate to the …

Lutheran Adolescent Spiritual Development: The Effect Of School Attendance On Spiritual Transformation Inventory Test Scores, Michael Weider

Doctoral Dissertations and Projects

Lutheran schools have been established to nurture and disciple children into the Christian faith. However, empirical evidence is lacking that Lutheran schools are accomplishing this goal. The purpose of this Causal comparative and Correlational study was to determine whether attendance at Lutheran or Public schools made a statistically significant difference on Spiritual Transformation Inventory 2.0 test scores among Lutheran adolescents. Participants (N=129) took the Spiritual Transformation Inventory 2.0 (STI) test which measures spiritual development from an attachment to God perspective. Data was analyzed using a t-test to examine between group differences as well as Spearman's rho to examine the relationship …

Comparing Types Of Student Placement And The Effect On Achievement For Students With Disabilities, Patricia Mason

Doctoral Dissertations and Projects

Since implementing No Child Left Behind, schools have improved student achievement while also preparing students for the 21st century. Schools continue to strive for 100% proficiency in all subgroups by 2014, but achievement gap exists for students with disabilities. This study used a causal comparative research design to test the concept of co-teaching by comparing types of placement for students with disabilities and the effect on student achievement. For this study, placement was considered where the student received instruction in either a general education class or a co-taught class during 9th through 11th grade. Student achievement was based on the …

60% Cash Payout Or 400% Pic Claim? Which Is Better? (Part 2 ), Teng Aun Khoo, Clement Kai Guan Tan

Research Collection School Of Accountancy

How an organisation can best optimise the benefits of the Productivity and innovation Credit (PIC) scheme offered by the Singapore government to boost productivity and innovation. Part 1 as published September 2013.

Zombie Board: Board Tenure And Firm Performance [Summary Of Paper], Sterling Huang

Research Collection School Of Accountancy

In my paper, Zombie Boards: Board Tenure and Firm Performance, which was recently made publicly available on SSRN, I empirically investigate how board tenure is related to firm performance and corporate decisions, holding other firm, CEO, and board characteristics constant. I find that board tenure has an inverted U-shaped relation with firm value, and that this curvilinear relation is reflected in M&A performance, financial reporting quality, corporate strategies and innovation, executive compensation, and CEO replacement. The results indicate that, for firms with short-tenured boards, the marginal effect of board learning dominates entrenchment effects, whereas for firms that have long-tenured …

Automatically Partition Software Into Least Privilege Components Using Dynamic Data Dependency Analysis, Yongzheng Wu, Jun Sun, Yang Liu, Jin Song Dong

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The principle of least privilege requires that software components should be granted only necessary privileges, so that compromising one component does not lead to compromising others. However, writing privilege separated software is difficult and as a result, a large number of software is monolithic, i.e., it runs as a whole without separation. Manually rewriting monolithic software into privilege separated software requires significant effort and can be error prone. We propose ProgramCutter, a novel approach to automatically partitioning monolithic software using dynamic data dependency analysis. ProgramCutter works by constructing a data dependency graph whose nodes are functions and edges are data …

A Link-Bridged Topic Model For Cross-Domain Document Classification, Pei Yang, Wei Gao, Qi Tan, Kam-Fai Wong

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Transfer learning utilizes labeled data available from some related domain (source domain) for achieving effective knowledge transformation to the target domain. However, most state-of-the-art cross-domain classification methods treat documents as plain text and ignore the hyperlink (or citation) relationship existing among the documents. In this paper, we propose a novel cross-domain document classification approach called Link-Bridged Topic model (LBT). LBT consists of two key steps. Firstly, LBT utilizes an auxiliary link network to discover the direct or indirect co-citation relationship among documents by embedding the background knowledge into a graph kernel. The mined co-citation relationship is leveraged to bridge the …

From Rssi To Csi: Indoor Localization Via Channel Response, Zheng Yang, Zimu Zhou, Yunhao Liu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The spatial features of emitted wireless signals are the basis of location distinction and determination for wireless indoor localization. Available in mainstream wireless signal measurements, the Received Signal Strength Indicator (RSSI) has been adopted in vast indoor localization systems. However, it suffers from dramatic performance degradation in complex situations due to multipath fading and temporal dynamics.

Tzuyu: Learning Stateful Typestates, Hao Xiao, Jun Sun, Yang Liu, Shang-Wei Lin, Chengnian Sun

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Behavioral models are useful for various software engineering tasks. They are, however, often missing in practice. Thus, specification mining was proposed to tackle this problem. Existing work either focuses on learning simple behavioral models such as finite-state automata, or relies on techniques (e.g., symbolic execution) to infer finite-state machines equipped with data states, referred to as stateful typestates. The former is often inadequate as finite-state automata lack expressiveness in capturing behaviors of data-rich programs, whereas the latter is often not scalable. In this work, we propose a fully automated approach to learn stateful typestates by extending the classic active learning …

Social Listening For Customer Acquisition, Juan Du, Biying Tan, Feida Zhu, Ee-Peng Lim

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Social network analysis has received much attention from corporations recently. Corporations are trying to utilize social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook and Sina Weibo to expand their own markets. Our system is an online tool to assist these corporations to 1) find potential customers, and 2) track a list of users by specific events from social networks. We employ both textual and network information, and thus produce a keyword-based relevance score for each user in pre-defined dimensions, which indicates the probability of the adoption of a product. Based on the score and its trend, out tool is able to …

Social Informatics, Adam Jatowt, Ee-Peng Lim, Ying Ding, Asako Miura, Taro Tezuka, Gael Dias, Katsumi Tanaka, Andrew J. Flanagin, Bing Tian Dai

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This book constitutes the proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Social Informatics, SocInfo 2013, held in Kyoto, Japan, in November 2013. The 23 full papers, 15 short papers, and three poster papers included in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 103 submissions. The papers present original research work on studying the interplay between socially-centric platforms and social phenomena.

Second Order Online Collaborative Filtering, Jing Lu, Steven C. H. Hoi, Jialei Wang, Peilin Zhao

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Collaborative Filtering (CF) is one of the most successful learning techniques in building real-world recommender systems. Traditional CF algorithms are often based on batch machine learning methods which suffer from several critical drawbacks, e.g., extremely expensive model retraining cost whenever new samples arrive, unable to capture the latest change of user preferences over time, and high cost and slow reaction to new users or products extension. Such limitations make batch learning based CF methods unsuitable for real-world online applications where data often arrives sequentially and user preferences may change dynamically and rapidly. To address these limitations, we investigate online collaborative …

Linguafolio Goal Setting Intervention And Academic Achievement: Increasing Student Capacity For Self-Regulated Learning, Oxana D. Clarke

Department of Teaching, Learning, and Teacher Education: Theses and Other Student Research

In the last few decades there has been a shift from thinking less about teaching and more about learning. Such a paradigm shift from teacher-centered to student-centered instruction requires students to think about their own learning and to monitor their own learning development and language achievement. Researchers have identified goal setting and self-regulated learning as crucial factors that affect academic achievement. Goal setting improves student performance and enhances achievement by allocating attention, activating effort, increasing persistence and motivation which in turn leads to the development of self-regulation skills. With this belief, LinguaFolio was integrated into foreign language classrooms to support …

The Appointment And Removal Of William J. Marbury And When An Office Vests, Saikrishna Bangalore Prakash

Notre Dame Law Review

Scholars have ignored the most important question in one of the most famous constitutional law cases, obscuring the machinations that spawned the dispute. This Article sheds light on the events that precipitated Marbury v. Madison and also explains when an appointment vests. Thomas Jefferson famously refused to deliver a commission to William J. Marbury, causing the latter to seek a writ of mandamus from the Supreme Court. The received wisdom supposes that Jefferson’s refusal rested on the grounds that Marbury had not been appointed a justice of the peace precisely because he never had received a commission. In fact, Jefferson’s …

Assessing The Moderating Effect Of Consumer Product Knowledge And Online Shopping Experience On Using Recommedation Agents For Customer Loyalty, Victoria Y. Yoon, R. Eric Hostler, Zhiling Guo, Tor Guimaraes

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Social media technologies have greatly facilitated the creation of many types of user-generated information, e.g., product rating information can be used to generate preference-based recommendation. As a decision support tool, a Recommendation Agent (RA) has been widely adopted by many e-commerce websites. The impact of RAs on online shopping has been extensively examined in the IS literature. However, from Marketing and Social Media perspectives, the widely adopted cognitive–affect–conative–action framework of customer loyalty has not been tested in the presence of RAs. Moreover, there has been little research assessing the impact of increasing consumer knowledge about specific product domains on customer …

Using Micro-Reviews To Select An Efficient Set Of Reviews, Thanh-Son Nguyen, Hady W. Lauw, Panayiotis Tsaparas

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Online reviews are an invaluable resource for web users trying to make decisions regarding products or services. However, the abundance of review content, as well as the unstructured, lengthy, and verbose nature of reviews make it hard for users to locate the appropriate reviews, and distill the useful information. With the recent growth of social networking and micro-blogging services, we observe the emergence of a new type of online review content, consisting of bite-sized, 140 character-long reviews often posted reactively on the spot via mobile devices. These micro-reviews are short, concise, and focused, nicely complementing the lengthy, elaborate, and verbose …

Achieving Revocable Fine-Grained Cryptographic Access Control Over Cloud Data, Yanjiang Yang, Xuhua Ding, Haibing Lu, Zhiguo Wan, Jianying Zhou

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Attribute-based encryption (ABE) is well suited for finegrained access control for data residing on a cloud server. However, existing approaches for user revocation are not satisfactory. In this work, we propose a new approach which works by splitting an authorized user’s decryption capability between the cloud and the user herself. User revocation is attained by simply nullifying the decryption ability at the cloud, requiring neither key update nor re-generation of cloud data. We propose a concrete scheme instantiating the approach, which features lightweight computation at the user side. This makes it possible for users to use resource-constrained devices such as …

Efficient Index-Based Approaches For Skyline Queries In Location-Based Applications, Ken C. K. Lee, Baihua Zheng, Cindy Chen, Chi-Yin Chow

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Enriching many location-based applications, various new skyline queries are proposed and formulated based on the notion of locational dominance, which extends conventional one by taking objects' nearness to query positions into account additional to objects' nonspatial attributes. To answer a representative class of skyline queries for location-based applications efficiently, this paper presents two index-based approaches, namely, augmented R-tree and dominance diagram. Augmented R-tree extends R-tree by including aggregated nonspatial attributes in index nodes to enable dominance checks during index traversal. Dominance diagram is a solution-based approach, by which each object is associated with a precomputed nondominance scope wherein query points …

Predicting Best Answerers For New Questions: An Approach Leveraging Topic Modeling And Collaborative Voting, Yuan Tian, Pavneet Singh Kochhar, Ee Peng Lim, Feida Zhu, David Lo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Community Question Answering (CQA) sites are becoming increasingly important source of information where users can share knowledge on various topics. Although these platforms bring new opportunities for users to seek help or provide solutions, they also pose many challenges with the ever growing size of the community. The sheer number of questions posted everyday motivates the problem of routing questions to the appropriate users who can answer them. In this paper, we propose an approach to predict the best answerer for a new question on CQA site. Our approach considers both user interest and user expertise relevant to the topics …

Upsizer: Synthetically Scaling An Empirical Relational Database, Y. C. Tay, Bing Tian Dai, Daniel T. Wang, Eldora Y. Sun, Yong Lin, Yuting Lin

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The TPC benchmarks have helped users evaluate database system performance at different scales. Although each benchmark is domain-specific, it is not equally relevant to different applications in the same domain. The present proliferation of applications also leaves many of them uncovered by the very limited number of current TPC benchmarks. There is therefore a need to develop tools for application-specific database benchmarking. This paper presents UpSizeR, a software that addresses the Dataset Scaling Problem: Given an empirical set of relational tables D and a scale factor s, generate a database state e D that is similar to D but s …

Covariance Selection By Thresholding The Sample Correlation Matrix, Binyan Jiang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This article shows that when the nonzero coefficients of the population correlation matrix are all greater in absolute value than (C₁logp/n)^1/2 for some constant C₁, we can obtain covariance selection consistency by thresholding the sample correlation matrix. Furthermore, the rate (logp/n)^1/2 is shown to be optimal.

Classification In P2p Networks With Cascade Support Vendor Machines, Hock Hee Ang, Vivekanand Gopalkrishnan, Steven C. H. Hoi, Wee-Keong Ng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Classification in Peer-to-Peer (P2P) networks is important to many real applications, such as distributed intrusion detection, distributed recommendation systems, and distributed antispam detection. However, it is very challenging to perform classification in P2P networks due to many practical issues, such as scalability, peer dynamism, and asynchronism. This article investigates the practical techniques of constructing Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifiers in the P2P networks. In particular, we demonstrate how to efficiently cascade SVM in a P2P network with the use of reduced SVM. In addition, we propose to fuse the concept of cascade SVM with bootstrap aggregation to effectively balance the …