Digital Commons Network^™

What To Expect When You Don’T Know What To Expect: Analysis Of International Student Expectations At Writing Centers, Ibtissem Belmihoub

English

This study focuses on international student expectations regarding Writing Centers, how participants develop these expectations and what Writing Centers can do to meet these expectations. Focus groups were held to gather data. The recorded interviews were then transcribed and analyzed using James Gee’s approach to critical discourse analysis. Findings include four categories of expectations that were developed by participants before they went to the Writing Center, during a session, or after a few experiences: workshops, tutors in different disciplines, “involved” tutors, and “fix” paper. The analysis reveals that expectations categories are developed when students connect and/or disconnect themselves from the …

Societies Of Control In Young Adult Literature: The Panoptic World Of Veronica Roth’S Trilogy Divergent, Nesreen Abdallah Eldoliefy

English

The didactic impact of Young Adult Literature is a haunting question in the field. Therefore, this paper anchors its analysis of Veronica Roth’s Divergent, Insurgent and Allegiant on Foucault’s concept of panopticism to demonstrate the containing nature of the trilogy. The trilogy engages with identity and potential questions that concern young readers. Seemingly, it proposes radical solutions, while in reality it retains layers of surveillance and control that obliterate any attempts for change. Reading the trilogy from Foucauldian lens demonstrates how no one can escape from the prison-with-prison world it offers. The paper illustrates how the trilogy foregrounds the destructive …

Literalized Metaphors In China Mieville’S Bas-Lag Novels, Kai Jerome Thorstad

English

In this paper, I will be discussing hybridity, Othering, and agency in China Miéville’s fantasy novels set in the world of Bas-Lag. I will be expanding upon Joan Gordon’s concept of “literalized metaphors” which suggests that fantasy fiction is able to comment on metaphorical concepts by literalizing those concepts into physical representations. Miéville’s novels offer commentary on the nature of the postcolonial concept of hybridity through the physical realities of the nonhuman xenians and the criminal Remade. I argue that, through these literalized metaphors, the Bas-Lag novels suggest that hybridity leads to Othering, but it also leads to greater agency …

Corvids And Canines In George R. R. Martin’S A Song Of Ice And Fire, Ann Marie Stewart

English

The series, A Song of Ice and Fire by George R. R. Martin has become increasingly popular among readers even during a time when fantasy novels have decreased in popularity. This rise in readership and viewership (with the television series Game of Thrones), has effectively started several discussions about the methods and choices of the author in regards to the plot, symbols, and characters. This paper will look at two characters within the novels, namely the corvids and the canines Martin uses as catalysts for furthering the plot and understanding the main characters. This paper examines the historical use of …

Front Cover

International Journal of Speleology

No abstract provided.

Addressing Off-Nominal Behaviors In Requirements For Embedded Systems, Daniel Aceituna

Computer Science

System requirements are typically specified on the assumption that the system's operating environment will behave in what is considered to be an expected and nominal manner. When gathering requirements, one concern is whether the requirements are too ambiguous to account for every possible, unintended, Off-Nominal Behavior (ONB) that the operating environment can create, which results in an undesired system state. In this dissertation, we present two automated approaches which can expose, within a set of embedded requirements, whether an ONB can result in an undesired system state. Both approaches employ a modeling technique developed as part of this dissertation called …

Email Classification Using A Self-Learning Technique Based On User Preferences, Swapna Gautam Phadke

Computer Science

In the current information overloaded atmosphere with an explosive growth of textual data, one can find it a challenging task to keep all the ducks in a row. This has resulted in an emergence of many Text Classification algorithms. Text classification is a process of categorizing data in pre-defined categories based on Topics or Genre. It is used - to classify named entities, Twitter and newspaper feeds, medical repository and Email. In this digital era of communication, Electronic mail is an important, and a popular means of communication. An Email inbox is often rife with different messages ranging from High …

Harnessing User Generated Multimedia Content In The Creation Of Collaborative Classification Structures And Retrieval Learning Games, Otto Jerome Borchert

Computer Science

This paper describes a software tool to assist groups of people in the classification and identification of real world objects called the Classification, Identification, and Retrieval-based Collaborative Learning Environment (CIRCLE). A thorough literature review identified current pedagogical theories that were synthesized into a series of five tasks: gathering, elaboration, classification, identification, and reinforcement through game play. This approach is detailed as part of an included peer reviewed paper. Motivation is increased through the use of formative and summative gamification; getting points completing important portions of the tasks and playing retrieval learning based games, respectively, which is also included as a …

Review Mining: Hierarchy Generation For Online Reviews, Prateek Rajan

Computer Science

In the present world of ecommerce more and more products are purchased and sold online then via any other medium. With such massive drive in online shopping more and more information is being added every day on web regarding the products and how good or bad are they. From the perspective of seller (such as Amazon) this information is very vital as this insight could be very helpful in making various decisions regarding inventory management, product pricing and so on. But the problem that arises in this context is the sheer volume of the reviews being added. In this paper …

Usability Construct For Mobile Applications: A Clustering Based Approach, Pratap Kotala

Computer Science

The growth of mobile applications that run on cell phones and other handheld devices has introduced a broad range of usability challenges that were not faced by the web and standalone PC environments. The current usability models for mobile applications are mostly based on the experience of the usability experts and users that were collected through surveys and field studies. Many usability researchers and practitioners have developed conceptual usability frameworks that utilize either different or overlapping usability attributes. Moreover, the usability frameworks in existence they are limited in scope and do not consider all the usability dimensions. There is no …

Fuzzy Reasoning Based Evolutionary Algorithms Applied To Data Mining, Min Chen

Computer Science

Data mining and information retrieval are two difficult tasks for various reasons. First, as the volume of data increases tremendously, most of the data are complex, large, imprecise, uncertain or incomplete. Furthermore, information retrieval may be imprecise or subjective. Therefore, comprehensible and understandable results are required by the users during the process of data mining or knowledge discovery. Fuzzy logic has become an active research area because its capability of handling perceptual uncertainties, such as ambiguity or vagueness, and its excellent ability on describing nonlinear system. The study of this dissertation is focused on two main paradigms. The first paradigm …

Service Learning And Ethnocultural Empathy: Developing Cultural Empathy Through Experience, Amanda Jean Pieters

Education

The purpose of the study was to explore the impact of experiential learning (through service learning) and ethnocultural empathy in undergraduate students. In other words, how does serving in the community impact how empathetic a person is toward others who are ethnically different than themselves? The researcher developed a 45 question electronic self-report survey utilizing The Scale of Ethnocultural Empathy (SEE; Wang et al., 2003) to assess mean empathy scores of participants. Research questions addressed: 1) Empathy scores of students who volunteered 10 or more hours, 2) Empathy scores of students who volunteered and served adult populations, 3) Empathy scores …

The Disintegration Of Yugoslavia And Football, Adnan Kajtezović

Dissertations and Theses @ UNI

The Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia was a multi-national state, consisting of six republics and two autonomous regions. However in 1991, the country descended into a tragic and bloody civil war, causing over two hundred thousand deaths and the migration of thousands. The disintegration of Yugoslavia produced seven independent countries: Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Macedonia, Montenegro and Kosovo.

The disintegration of Yugoslavia has been analyzed from different analytical perspectives. This project utilizes the analytical context of Yugoslavian popular culture, and focuses on the most popular sport in the country, football. Football is analyzed in two historical periods of …

Call Me Alix, Not Elix: Vowels Are More Important Than Consonants In Own-Name Recognition At 5 Months., Camillia Bouchon, Caroline Floccia, Thibaut Fux, Martine Adda-Decker, Thierry Nazzi

School of Psychology

Consonants and vowels differ acoustically and articulatorily, but also functionally: Consonants are more relevant for lexical processing, and vowels for prosodic/syntactic processing. These functional biases could be powerful bootstrapping mechanisms for learning language, but their developmental origin remains unclear. The relative importance of consonants and vowels at the onset of lexical acquisition was assessed in French-learning 5-month-olds by testing sensitivity to minimal phonetic changes in their own name. Infants' reactions to mispronunciations revealed sensitivity to vowel but not consonant changes. Vowels were also more salient (on duration and intensity) but less distinct (on spectrally based measures) than consonants. Lastly, vowel …

Designing A Multimedia Learning Environment That Engages Children Through Narrative, Glenn W. Ellis, Al Rudnitsky, Beth Mcginnis-Cavanaugh, Isabel Huff, Sonia K. Ellis

Engineering: Faculty Publications

This paper examines the use of Imaginative Education for designing an online learning environment for middle school engineering education. In Imaginative Education, cognitive tools associated with the development of linguistic ability are used to engage learners and frame their learning productively. The Through My Window website applies a variety of cognitive tools related to mythic and romantic understanding through the use of an online novel and interactive learning adventures associated with the novel. The focus of this paper is an AI learning adventure on the website titled Rio's Brain. It was found, through embedded assessment within the learning adventure, that …

Lessons From Data: Avoiding Lore Bias In Research Paradigms, Roberta D. Kjesrud

The Writing Center Journal

No abstract provided.

Le Code Civil De Louisiane En Francais: Traduction Et Retraduction, Olivier Moreteau

Journal Articles

No abstract provided.

A Taste For Things: Sensory Rhetoric Beyond The Human, Justine Beatrice Wells

Theses and Dissertations

Amidst rising agricultural pollution, poor conditions for livestock animals, and disparity between “high” and “low” food cultures, gustatory taste has entered contemporary public rhetoric as a significant modality of intervention. This dissertation considers the environmentalist and social potential of this public embrace of sensory rhetoric. To do so, I build a rhetorical theory of sensation through a sensory re-engagement of the rhetorical tradition. Scottish Enlightenment thinkers, I argue, embraced aesthetic taste as a site where rhetoric and ethics mingle, and yet in promoting its cultivation, they fell into elitism. The subsequent, Marxist discourse on sensory emancipation developed rhetoric’s sensory and …

The King’S Cabinet Splintered: The Impact Of Digital Mediation On The Kings Cabinet Opened, Travis A. Mullen

Theses and Dissertations

In June of 1645, the Parliamentarian New Model Army seized a packet of King Charles I’s private correspondence at the battle of Naseby. This seizure was a crucial propagandistic victory that enabled the Parliamentarians to do irreparable damage to Charles’ public image and, in contrast, to ingratiate themselves to the public. The Parliamentarians carefully selected, decoded, and arranged the letters in an effort to reveal Charles as a duplicitous ruler that cared more for his wife, Henrietta Maria, than his people. The collection is increasingly seen by critics as a case study in mediation through print—not just of private correspondence, …

A Qualitative Study Of Street Smarts Among African American Male High School Dropouts: Implications For School Counselors, Charlette Taylor

Theses and Dissertations

This study investigates street smart African American males who dropped out of high school. Using a qualitative phenomenological design, the researcher interviewed six participants, to explore their experiences related to street smarts in school and the influences on their decision to drop out. The framework of the study is based on Robert Sternberg’s Triarchic Theory of Intelligence. The role of the school counselor in dropout prevention according to the American School Counselor Association’s (ASCA) National Model is presented. Themes from the data include: intelligence, self-sufficient, and support. Implications for school counselors who work in direct and indirect consultation with teachers, …

Making The Irrational Rational: Nietzsche And The Problem Of Knowledge In Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master And Margarita, Brendan Mooney

Theses and Dissertations

The goal of this thesis is twofold: first, to explore the influence of the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche on the Russian writer Mikhail Bulgakov, and second, to use Nietzsche’s unpublished essay “On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense” (written 1873) to examine the problem of knowledge in Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita (written 1928-1940).

In existing scholarship on Bulgakov’s masterpiece The Master and Margarita, the novel’s epistemological underpinnings are a topic that remains relatively unacknowledged. The “supernatural” element presents an opportunity to examine the manner in which man interacts with unprecedented phenomena, that is, phenomena that do not …

The Effective Use Of Reserve Personnel In The U.S. Military: Lessons From The United Kingdom Reserve Model, Shima D. Keene Dr.

Books, Monographs & Collaborative Studies

View the Executive Summary

This monograph identifies areas where the U.S. Army and other services can potentially benefit from examining the United Kingdom's comparable program of reserve reform. Key areas where aspects of this reform have been entirely counterproductive are identified, as well as specific and expensive recent British mistakes which it is essential for the U.S. military to avoid.

Chat Communication In A Command And Control Environment: How Does It Help?, April M. Courtice

Browse all Theses and Dissertations

Military command and control (C2) teams are often faced with difficult, complex, and distributed operations amidst the fog and friction of war. To deal with this uncertainty, teams rely on clear and effective communication to coordinate their actions; two current conduits for communication in distributed military teams include voice and chat. Chat communication is regarded by many in the C2 world as the premier method of communicating with the power to lessen some of the traffic and disturbances of current voice communication, and its usage continues to exponentially increase. Despite this operational view, countless laboratory studies have demonstrated detrimental effects …

Temporally Biased Search Result Snippets, J. Abhiram Tatineni

Browse all Theses and Dissertations

The search engine result snippets are an important source of information for the user to obtain quick insights into the corresponding result documents. When the search terms are too general, like a person's name or a company's name, creating an appropriate snippet that effectively summarizes the document's content can be challenging owing to multiple occurrences of the search term in the top ranked documents, without a simple means to select a subset of sentences containing them to form result snippet. In web pages classified as narratives and news articles, multiple references to explicit, implicit and relative temporal expressions can be …

Mining Behavior Of Citizen Sensor Communities To Improve Cooperation With Organizational Actors, Hemant Purohit

Browse all Theses and Dissertations

Web 2.0 (social media) provides a natural platform for dynamic emergence of citizen (as) sensor communities, where the citizens generate content for sharing information and engaging in discussions. Such a citizen sensor community (CSC) has stated or implied goals that are helpful in the work of formal organizations, such as an emergency management unit, for prioritizing their response needs. This research addresses questions related to design of a cooperative system of organizations and citizens in CSC. Prior research by social scientists in a limited offline and online environment has provided a foundation for research on cooperative behavior challenges, including 'articulation' …

A Survey On Wind Turbine Condition Monitoring And Fault Diagnosis−Part Ii: Signals And Signal Processing Methods, Wei Qiao, Dingguo Lu

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering: Faculty Publications

This paper provides a comprehensive survey on the state-of-the-art condition monitoring and fault diagnostic technologies for wind turbines. The Part II of this survey focuses on the signals and signal processing methods used for wind turbine condition monitoring and fault diagnosis.

Invisible But Essential: The Role Of Professional Networks In Promoting Faculty Agency In Career Advancement, Elizabeth Niehaus, Kerryann O'Meara

Department of Educational Administration: Faculty Publications

The benefits of professional networks are largely invisible to the people embedded in them (O’Reilly 1991), yet professional networks may provide key benefits for faculty careers. The purpose of the study reported here was to explore the role of professional networks in faculty agency in career advancement, specifically focusing on the overall relationship between the social capital gained from networks and faculty agency in career advancement. Findings suggest that off-campus networks are particularly important for faculty agency but that the benefits of networks may take time to develop.

Using Visual Scene Displays As Communication Support Options For People With Chronic, Severe Aphasia: A Summary Of Aac Research And Future Research Directions, David R. Beukelman, Karen Hux, Aimee R. Dietz, Miechelle L. Mckelvey, Kristy S.E. Weissling

Department of Special Education and Communication Disorders: Faculty Publications

Research about the effectiveness of communicative supports and advances in photographic technology has prompted changes in the way speech-language pathologists design and implement interventions for people with aphasia. The purpose of this paper is to describe the use of photographic images as a basis for developing communication supports for people with chronic aphasia secondary to sudden-onset events due to cerebrovascular accidents (strokes). Topics include the evolution of AAC-based supports as they relate to people with aphasia, the development and key features of visual scene displays (VSDs), and future directions concerning the incorporation of photographs into communication supports for people with …

Mining User Viewpoints In Online Discussions, Minghui Qiu

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

Online discussion forums are a type of social media which contains rich usercontributed facts, opinions, and user interactions on diverse topics. The large volume of opinionated data generated in online discussions provides an ideal testbed for user opinion mining. In particular, mining user opinions on social and political issues from online discussions is useful not only to government organizations and companies but also to social and political scientists. In this dissertation, we propose to study the task of mining user viewpoints or stances from online discussions on social and political issues. Specifically, we will talk about our proposed approaches for …

A Descriptive, Comparative Health Assessment Of Unique Older-Adult Populations In Israel, Eliana Marcus Aaron

Yale School of Nursing Digital Theses

Background: Israel is among the nations with the fastest growing older adult population in the world, due to Baby Boomer aging, high immigration rates, and high life expectancies. The country is mandated to provide health coverage to all citizens, but it has historically been poorly equipped to provide geriatric health care. Israel's elders include numerous minorities and special groups, and despite research of many groups over decades, disparities continue to exist. Methods: A descriptive analysis of special geriatric populations and their health issues was performed based on national and international literature, government reports, and statistics. Results: Five research-based unique populations …