Digital Commons Network^™

Assessing Nato's Eastern European "Flank", Luis Simón

The US Army War College Quarterly: Parameters

No abstract provided.

Does Darden's Foreign Direct Investment Benefit Malaysia's Economy?, Nicole Tan

Washington Semester Program

No abstract provided.

Persistence And Stability Of Eastern Afromontane Forests: Evidence From Brevicipitid Frogs, Simon P. Loader, F. Sara Ceccarelli, Michele Menegon, Kim M. Howell, Roman Kassahun, Abebe A. Mengistu, Samy A. Saber, Fikirte Gebresenbet, Rafael O. De Sá, Et Al.

Biology Faculty Publications

Aim: The persistence and stability of habitats through time are considered predictors of high levels of biodiversity in some environments. Long-term habitat persistence and stability may explain the species-rich, endemic forest fauna and flora of the Eastern Afromontane Biodiversity Region (EABR). Using comple- mentary phylogenetic and biogeographical approaches, we examine evolution- ary patterns in EAR brevicipitid frogs. Using these data, we test whether brevicipitid history reflects patterns of long-term forest persistence and/or sta bility across the EABR.

Location: East Africa.

Methods: A dated phylogeny for brevicipitids was constructed using two nuclear and three mitochondrial markers. Alternative diversification modes were used …

Hidden Agenda? Cultural Policy In Hong Kong’S Urban Redevelopment, Tobias Zuser

Lingnan Theses

For many years industrial buildings in Hong Kong have formed some of the city’s most vibrant cultural clusters by providing local artists with low-cost space to pursue their creative work. However, recent efforts by the government also targeted these areas for commercial revitalization. By 2020 the industrial part of Kwun Tong, a densely populated district in Kowloon East, will not only have been transformed into the city’s second Central Business District, but also seen the majority of the current cultural workers leaving due to the rapid valorisation of land. Nevertheless, these ongoing struggles over spatial power have also opened up …

Housing Market Distortions And The Mortgage Interest Deduction, Andrew R. Hanson, Hal Martin

Economics Faculty Research and Publications

Housing market distortions from the mortgage interest deduction (MID) typically focus on a single choice measure such as home size or self-reported amount of debt on a new mortgage. We estimate the amount of mortgage interest deducted on federal tax returns to capture the full range of housing market distortions from the MID. Our primary results show that for every one percentage point increase in the tax rate that applies to deductibility, the amount of mortgage interest deducted increases by US$303 to US$590. Empirical estimates imply elasticities of mortgage interest deducted with respect to the after-tax cost of housing between …

Get Yourself Connected: Time, Space, And Character Networks In David Mitchell's Fiction, Josh Lesser

College of Liberal Arts & Social Sciences Theses and Dissertations

This thesis explores the works of novelist David Mitchell, paying specific attention to the ways in which he uses his narratives to emulate and remediate global networks and contemporary fiction tropes. Though his novels are rarely set in the immediate present, Mitchell's creations are connected in ways that specifically evoke social networks, Internet databases and new media. He has created an insular universe through five novels, and goes out his way to show that every character is a node in a web that spans all five. Characters reappear in novels that are not otherwise related to each other, or reveal …

A Content Analysis Of Backpage.Com Advertisements In Louisville, Kentucky., Theresa C. Hayden

Faculty and Staff Scholarship

Backpage.com and Craigslist are replacing the street corner as a crime source for buying and selling of sex. “To reduce commercial sexual exploitation and enforce existing trafficking laws, communities must first recognize the extent of the problem within their local area (Janson, Mann, Marro, & Matvey, 2013, 99). In a population density study conducted in 15 major U. S. cities, it was found that males over 18 years of age who buy sex online ranged from 0.6% in San Francisco to 21.4% in Houston (Roe-Sepoqitz, Hickle, Gallagher, Smith, & Hedberg, 2013). Researchers in the Greater Cincinnati area found a high …

Mobility, Retention And Productivity Of Genomics Scientists In The United States, Kenneth Guang-Lih Huang, Gokhan Ertug

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Scientific and technological innovations by highly skilled scientists and inventors are critical to the long-term economic health of the United States. These scientists enable the creation and flow of scientific research and technologies from public institutions such as universities to private firms and vice versa by forming vital linkages between them. The exchange of new ideas and the commercialization of promising scientific and technological innovations have resulted in the formation of new high-technology startups, growth opportunities within entrepreneurial and established science-based firms, and jobs creation. These form the backbone of the scientific innovation ecosystem in the United States. A potential …

Designing Efficient Infrastructural Investment And Asset Transfer Mechanisms In Humanitarian Supply Chains, Shantanu Bhattacharya, Sameer Hasija, Luk N. Van Wassenhove

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

We analyze the efficacy of different asset transfer mechanisms and provide policy recommendations for the design of humanitarian supply chains. As a part of their preparedness effort, humanitarian organizations often make decisions on resource investments ex ante because doing so allows for rapid response if an adverse event occurs. However, programs typically operate under funding constraints and donor earmarks with autonomous decision-making authority resting with the local entities, which makes the design of efficient humanitarian supply chains a challenging problem. We formulate this problem in an agency setting with two independent aid programs, where different asset transfer mechanisms are considered …

Exhibit "To The Light Of Resurrection Through The Thorns Of Catacombs”, Iryna Ivankovych

Occasional Papers on Religion in Eastern Europe

No abstract provided.

Merriman Winner Interview: Kathleen Mcgrath

NASIG Newsletter

No abstract provided.

September 2014 Full Issue

NASIG Newsletter

No abstract provided.

On Oprah And Rob Bell As Experiments In Incarnation: A Response To James Wellman, Justin Kh Tse

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

James Wellman has done it. Critiquing academic analyses that examine only the message without the medium and the reception, Wellman asks us to journey with him to field work with Rob Bell. This is a risky proposition because it invites the scholars who read Wellman to consider how scholarship is not just a set of ideas to be picked apart, but to be embodied.

Experiments On Crowdsourcing Policy Assessment, John Prpić, Araz Taeihagh, James Melton

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Can Crowds serve as useful allies in policy design? How do non-expert Crowds perform relative to experts in the assessment of policy measures? Does the geographic location of non-expert Crowds, with relevance to the policy context, alter the performance of non-experts Crowds in the assessment of policy measures? In this work, we investigate these questions by undertaking experiments designed to replicate expert policy assessments with non-expert Crowds recruited from Virtual Labor Markets. We use a set of ninety-six climate change adaptation policy measures previously evaluated by experts in the Netherlands as our control condition to conduct experiments using two discrete …

Cosmopolitanism As Cultural Capital: Exploring The Intersection Of Globalization, Education, And Stratification, Hiroki Igarashi, Hiro Saito

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

In recent years, sociological research on cosmopolitanism has begun to draw on Pierre Bourdieu to critically examine how cosmopolitanism is implicated in stratification on an increasingly global scale. In this paper, we examine the analytical potential of the Bourdieusian approach by exploring how education systems help to institutionalize cosmopolitanism as cultural capital whose access is rendered structurally unequal. To this end, we first probe how education systems legitimate cosmopolitanism as a desirable disposition at the global level, while simultaneously distributing it unequally among different groups of actors according to their geographical locations and volumes of economic, cultural, and social capital …

Transport Inequity & Disadvantage In Celtic Tiger Dublin – Preliminary Results, Sarah Rock, Aoife Ahern

Conference Papers

This paper explores social equity issues in transport and land-use planning, using recently developed housing areas in Dublin as a case study. As a pillar of sustainable development, social equity is an important objective of transport planning. During the 2000s, Dublin experienced a significant increase in car ownership levels and usage. There is now a growing body of research that links increasing car ownership, usage and dependency to increasing levels of inequity and transport disadvantage. The paper briefly outlines the evolving theoretical considerations of relevance to transport and land-use related equity, and establishes a framework from which to draw a …

The One Balm For All Earth’S Wounds: The Priority Of Gospel Proclamation In Charles Haddon Spurgeon’S Missiology, John Sypert

Doctoral Dissertations and Projects

This dissertation explores the relationship between gospel proclamation and mercy ministry in Charles Spurgeon’s ministry. The dissertation argues that Spurgeon’s Pastors College, Stockwell Orphanage, and his multitude of other ministries had one clear goal: the spreading of the gospel and the conversion of the lost. This dissertation uses Spurgeon’s approach to missions as an apologetic for a more biblically precise missiology, namely, one that prioritizes gospel proclamation without neglecting the physical needs of those who suffer. This approach could be called “benevolent prioritism” because it prioritizes the proclamation of the gospel while not neglecting works of love for those suffering.

A Study Of Age Gaps Between Online Friends, Lizi Liao, Jing Jiang, Ee Peng Lim, Heyan Huang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

User attribute extraction on social media has gain considerable attention, while existing methods are mostly supervised which suffer great diffi- culty in insufficient gold standard data. In this paper, we validate a strong hypothesis based on homophily and adapt it to ensure the certainty of user attribute we extracted via weakly supervised propagation. Homophily, the theory which states that people who are similar tend to become friends, has been well studied in the setting of online social networks. When we focus on age attribute, based on this theory, online friends tend to have similar age. In this work, we take …

The Use Of Geospatial Clustering In Analysing Health Risk Profile, Sue-Mae Yeo, Tin Seong Kam, Kai Xin Thia, Dan Wu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Background & Hypothesis: The first law of geography states that “everything is related to everything else, but near things are more related than distant things”. This study aims to demonstrate how local indicator of spatial association (LISA) statistics are used to group patients with similar chronic diseases into natural clusters of hotspots found within northern Singapore by incorporating the proximity of their home locations explicitly. Methods: Anonymised chronic patient data collected from Khoo Teck Puat Hospital in 2013 were used for analyses. The data was mapped based on patients' residential addresses. A layer of hexagonal grid objects, each with a …

Software Defined Application Delivery Networking, Subharthi Paul

All Theses and Dissertations (ETDs)

In this thesis we present the architecture, design, and prototype implementation details of AppFabric. AppFabric is a next generation application delivery platform for easily creating, managing and controlling massively distributed and very dynamic application deployments that may span multiple datacenters.

Over the last few years, the need for more flexibility, finer control, and automatic management of large (and messy) datacenters has stimulated technologies for virtualizing the infrastructure components and placing them under software-based management and control; generically called "Software-defined Infrastructure" (SDI). However, current applications are not designed to leverage this dynamism and flexibility offered by SDI and they mostly depend …

The Role Of Empathy And Sympathy In Character Education, Radhi Al-Mabuk

Faculty Publications

The purpose of this paper is to describe and highlight the role of empathy and sympathy in character education. More specifically, the bridging function of empathy and sympathy to civility and their role in promoting development in the context of forgiveness will be emphasized. The paper is organized in five major parts. The first one consists of an introduction and a brief historical overview of character education followed by a discussion of the aims of character education and the school’s role in nurturing it. In the second part, an argument is made for forgiveness as a means of promoting development …

Thinking Geospatially: How Variable Relationships With Reaching Achievement Test Scores In The State Of Missouri Vary*By Geospatial Location, Elizabeth Jane Wallington

All Theses and Dissertations (ETDs)

The purpose of this was to examine whether district-level factors had an effect on literacy achievement, and whether the relationships between district composition factors and literacy achievement vary by geographic location, in this case the state of Missouri. The dissertation determined if the variable relationships were significant and if the statistically significant relationships were geographically nonstationary. Stationarity refers to the idea that relationships are stable across a geographic area. In contrast, nonstationarity indicates that relationships vary by geography. This means that relationships may be significant in one geographic area of the state but not significant in another. By including geographic …

The Lotic Intersite Nitrogen Experiments: An Example Of Successful Ecological Research Collaboration, Linx Collaborators, Walter K. Dodds, Jackson R. Webster, Chelsea L. Crenshaw, Ashley M. Helton, Jonathan M. O'Brien, Eugenia Marti, Anne E. Hershey

Faculty Publications

Collaboration is an essential skill for modern ecologists because it brings together diverse expertise, viewpoints, and study systems. The Lotic Intersite Nitrogen eXperiments (LINX I and II), a 17-y research endeavor involving scores of early- to late-career stream ecologists, is an example of the benefits, challenges, and approaches of successful collaborative research in ecology. The scientific success of LINX reflected tangible attributes including clear scientific goals (hypothesis-driven research), coordinated research methods, a team of cooperative scientists, excellent leadership, extensive communication, and a philosophy of respect for input from all collaborators. Intangible aspects of the collaboration included camaraderie and strong team …

Speleothem And Biofilm Formation In A Granite/Dolerite Cave, Northern Sweden, Therese Sallstedt, Magnus Ivarsson, Johannes Lundberg, Rabbe Sjöberg, Juan Ramón Vidal Romaní

International Journal of Speleology

Tjuv-Antes grotta (Tjuv-Ante's Cave) located in northern Sweden is a round-abraded sea cave ('tunnel cave'), about 30 m in length, formed by rock-water abrasion in a dolerite dyke in granite gneiss. Abundant speleothems are restricted to the inner, mafic parts of the cave and absent on granite parts. The speleothems are of two types: cylindrical (coralloid, popcorn-like), and flowstone (thin crusts). Coralloids correspond to terrestrial stromatolite speleothems in which layers of light calcite alternate with dark, silica-rich laminae. The dark laminae are also enriched in carbon and contain incorporated remains of microorganisms. Two types of microbial communities can be distinguished …

Caves In Caves: Evolution Of Post-Depositional Macroholes In Stalagmites, Nurit Shtober-Zisu, Henry P. Schwarcz, Tom Chow, Christopher R. Omelon, Gordon Southam

International Journal of Speleology

In a previous paper (Shtober-Zisu et al., 2012) we described millimeter to centime-sized fluid-free holes within the interiors of stalagmites of widely varying origin. We present here further observations of this phenomenon, using X-ray tomography, macroscopic and microscopic observation of sections of twenty-six stalagmites from various sites in North America and the Caribbean region. We can distinguish three types of cavities in speleothems: primary µm-sized fluid inclusions; mm to cm sized holes, aligned along the stalagmite growth axis which are clearly syngenetic; and µm to cm-sized holes away from the growth axis (“off-axis holes or OAHs”) deeply buried inside their …

Niche Differentiation In Meta Bourneti And M. Menardi (Araneae, Tetragnathidae) With Notes On The Life History, Stefano Mammola, Marco Isaia

International Journal of Speleology

Meta menardi and M. bourneti are two species of spiders inhabiting caves and other subterranean habitats. The occurrence of both species within the same cave has never been proved convincingly and several authors hypothesized a complete niche differentiation mainly based on microclimatic conditions.In order to study the apparent niche differentiation of the two species, we studied several populations of M. menardi and M. bourneti occurring in six caves in the Western Italian Alps (NW Italy). A series of squared plots were monitored monthly from March 2012 to February 2013. At each survey, we counted individuals and we collected the main …

Seal Coat Productivity, Jon Padfield, Jim Handy, Jim Stephens

JTRP Technical Reports

The Indiana Department of Transportation (INDOT) conducts chip seal operations on state highways to prolong the life of the road. The chip seal operation is labor, equipment and material intensive. A typical chip seal operation may involve 35 or more INDOT employees including truck drivers, flagmen, and equipment operators (brooms, rollers, aggregate spreader, and distributors).

This project was launched to better understand and document variations in how each of the six INDOT districts, approach the planning and execution of their respective chip seal operations. The goal was to identify areas in the operation where there were differences between districts and …

"Insha'allah I'Ll Do My Homework": Adapting To Arab Undergraduates At An English-Speaking University In Dubai, Chrysi Rapanta

All Works

The United Arab Emirates and Dubai in particular have in recent years attracted an increased number of Western teachers for all educational levels, especially universities. As part of the orientation for a Western teacher before entering a classroom, the main differences between Western and Middle East culture are often highlighted without an effort to explain how these differences are manifested in students' behavior in courses, or to suggest how the teacher could address them. This paper aims at helping current and future faculty in their professional practice by considering Emirati Arab cultural characteristics as well as strategies adopted by the …

Exploring Determinants And Effects Of Foreign Direct Investment: The Case Of Sub-Saharan Africa, Joan O. W. Kiiru

Graduate Masters Theses

Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) is among the most dynamic international resource flows to developing countries. FDI's is usually a mix of investments in both tangible and intangible assets and firms that deploy such assets are often important players in the global economy. Many argue that FDI can be expected to facilitate the transfer of new technology, help improve workers' skills and welfare in recipient countries. Others argue that FDI is focused primarily on resource extraction and may have little broad contribution to recipient economy. But what are the determinants of FDI? What is the role of resource prices, macroeconomic and …

Intent-Based User Segmentation With Query Enhancement, Wei Xiong

Dissertations

With the rapid advancement of the internet, accurate prediction of user's online intent underlying their search queries has received increasing attention from the online advertising community. As a rich source of information on web user's behavior, query logs have been leveraged by advertising companies to deliver personalized advertisements. However, a typical query usually contains very few terms, which only carry a small amount of information about a user's interest. The tendency of users to use short and ambiguous queries makes it difficult to fully describe and distinguish a user's intent. In addition, the query feature space is sparse, as only …