Digital Commons Network^™

Patterns Of Authorship In Ecology And Evolution: First, Last, And Corresponding Authorship Vary With Gender And Geography, Charles W. Fox, Josiah P. Ritchey, C. E. Timothy Paine

Entomology Faculty Publications

The position of an author on the byline of a paper affects the inferences readers make about their contributions to the research. We examine gender differences in authorship in the ecology literature using two datasets: submissions to six journals between 2010 and 2015 (regardless of whether they were accepted), and manuscripts published by 151 journals between 2009 and 2015. Women were less likely to be last (i.e., “senior”) authors (averaging ~23% across journals, years, and datasets) and sole authors (~24%), but more likely to be first author (~38%), relative to their overall frequency of authorship (~31%). However, the proportion of …

Legal Malpractice Claims: What The Data Indicate, Vincent R. Johnson

St. Mary's Journal on Legal Malpractice & Ethics

Abstract forthcoming

Breaking The Silence: Holding Texas Lawyers Accountable For Sexual Harassment, Savannah Files

St. Mary's Journal on Legal Malpractice & Ethics

Following the 2017 exposure of Harvey Weinstein, the #MeToo movement spread rapidly across social media platforms calling for increased awareness of the prevalence of sexual harassment and assault and demanding change. The widespread use of the hashtag brought attention to the issue and successfully facilitated a much-needed discussion in today’s society. However, this is not the first incident prompting a demand for change.

Efforts to bring awareness and exact change in regards to sexual harassment in the legal profession date back to the 1990s. This demonstrates that the legal profession is not immune from these issues. In fact, at least …

Imperfect Produce Pricing: Relationships Between Price Percent Discount And Demographic Traits Of Customers, April Foster

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This research sought to understand the impact of price reductions on consumer spending behaviors related to the purchase of imperfect produce. Additionally, the correlation between consumers’ demographics and their willingness to purchase imperfect produce at various price points was evaluated. The data was viewed with mindfulness toward reducing food loss as a function of the world food crisis. More specifically, the purpose of this study was to describe the relationship between Washington County, Arkansas consumers’ demographic traits and the percent discount at which they are willing to alter their behavior to purchase specific imperfect produce items. Using the Theory of …

Vol 63 #6, Melanie Argo

MPLA Newsletter

No abstract provided.

Informal Rulemaking And Democratic Participation Fda – Food Labeling, Fcc – Net Neutrality, A Text Mining Study, Casey Shannon

Public Administration Master’s Projects

The Administrative Procedure Act (APA) is supposed to make the rulemaking process at the administrative level democratic. This study will look at two examples of federal regulatory agencies – Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). The topics are food labeling, and net neutrality respectively. The APA highlights the process of notice and comment rulemaking. The APA is evaluated in the literature review for effectiveness and shortcomings. Interest groups play a key role in the policy making process; interest groups inform and mobilize citizens, and then coordinate commenting on agency rule propositions. This can sometimes lead …

Productivity Framework, J Roberts

Professional Services

No abstract provided.

Macro-/Micro-Controlled 3d Lithium-Ion Batteries Via Additive Manufacturing And Electric Field Processing, Jie Li, Xinhua Liang, Frank W. Liou, Jonghyun Park

Chemical and Biochemical Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

This paper presents a new concept for making battery electrodes that can simultaneously control macro-/micro-structures and help address current energy storage technology gaps and future energy storage requirements. Modern batteries are fabricated in the form of laminated structures that are composed of randomly mixed constituent materials. This randomness in conventional methods can provide a possibility of developing new breakthrough processing techniques to build well-organized structures that can improve battery performance. In the proposed processing, an electric field (EF) controls the microstructures of manganese-based electrodes, while additive manufacturing controls macro-3D structures and the integration of both scales. The synergistic control of …

Different Estimation Methods For The Basic Independent Component Analysis Model, Zhenyi An

Arts & Sciences Graduate Student Theses and Dissertations

Inspired by classic cocktail-party problem, the basic Independent Component Analysis (ICA) model is created. What differs Independent Component Analysis (ICA) from other kinds of analysis is the intrinsic non-Gaussian assumption of the data. Several approaches are proposed based on maximizing the non-Gaussianity of the data, which is measured by kurtosis, mutual information, and others. With each estimation, we need to optimize the functions of expectations of non-quadratic functions since it can help us to access the higher-order statistics of non-Gaussian part of the data. In this thesis, our goal is to review the one of the most efficient estimation methods, …

The Consequences Of Processing Of Goal-Irrelevant Information During The Stroop Task In Younger And Older Adults, Jessica Nicosia

Arts & Sciences Graduate Student Theses and Dissertations

Recent evidence from memory paradigms indicates that older adults can sometimes benefit more from processing goal-irrelevant information than younger adults, however these studies have often failed to simultaneously provide evidence of age-related control deficits. In the present experiments, participants initially studied a list of words. They then received a color-naming Stroop task where neutral words were either previously studied or new words. Across three experiments, participants were given different types of memory tests to examine the lingering effects of the neutral words during color-naming in younger and older adults. The results from all three experiments (including an attempted replication study) …

Psychopathic Personality Traits As A Moderator Of The Relationship Between Social Intelligence And Relational Aggression, Savannah Merold

Master's Theses

Social intelligence has been identified as one of many predictors of relational aggression. It is likely that a certain level of social intelligence may be necessary for relationally aggressive behaviors to be effective (e.g., some ability to understand human behavior is necessary to effectively harm others through the manipulation of status, social relationships, or sense of belonging). And yet, social intelligence is unlikely to be sufficient to produce relationally aggressive behavior. Merely because someone has the requisite levels of social intelligence to use relational aggression does not mean that he or she will be motivated to do so. There is …

Epic Adolescence: Contemporary Adolescence In Philip Pullman’S His Dark Materials, Chloe Felterman

Master's Theses

To find the truth of a societal construct or phenomena, it can help to look at the world of fiction and fantasy. Though this idea may seem ironic or counter-intuitive, one will find that fictional literature can reveal the working order of its respective society. Philip Pullman’s epic fantasy trilogy, His Dark Materials, uses and manipulates the traditional constructs of the genre to reflect and re-imagine the concepts of adolescence of the late-20^th and early-21^st centuries. Eleven-year-old protagonist Lyra Belacqua and subsequently her cohort, Will Perry, reveal the complications and difficulties modern American and British adolescents experience as …

The Song Style Of Antonio Carlos Jobim: An Analysis Of Four Songs, Rachel Rogers

Master's Theses

The songs of Antônio Carlos Jobim are a national treasure of Brazil, beloved around the world. Their beauty and subtle simplicity have enthralled audiences for the last 60 years, yet they often reveal some unusual construction. Following the lead of other Brazilian theorists, this study was commenced with the belief that applying rigorous theoretical analysis to bossa nova would show its qualityand enduring worth. Four songs were selected for analysis based on their importance in Jobim’s career and their centrality to the bossa nova genre, “Chega de Saudade,” “Corcovado,” “Insensatez,” and “Garota de Ipanema.” They are among the most recorded …

Investigating Possible Scurvy In The Postclassic Maya Of Tipu, Emmalea Gomberg

Master's Theses

Although residing in a tropical environment, numerous researchers have posited the possibility of scurvy in the Maya in recent years. The historic population of Tipu in western Belize dating to AD 1541-1638 is one of the largest and best preserved Maya series, and was therefore evaluated for possible presence of scurvy since the diet appears typical of the pre-contact Petén populations. The temporal bones and greater wings of the sphenoid were analyzed for scorbutic activity in 143 individuals, along with periodontal disease and antemortem tooth loss to determine if there was a co-occurrence with scurvy.

Overall, 27% of the sample …

Using Personality Traits To Predict Pectoral Fin Contact Initiation Role In Bottlenose Dolphins (Tursiops Truncatus), Riley Paige Macgregor

Master's Theses

Contact with the pectoral fin facilitates formation and maintenance of social relationships between dolphins (Dudzinski & Ribic, 2017). Additionally, several studies have shown that bottlenose dolphins have distinct personalities that are consistent across time and situation (e.g., Highfill & Kuczaj, 2007; Kuczaj, Highfill, & Byerly, 2012), and it has been suggested that these individual differences (i.e., personality) may influence tactile behavior exchanges. The current study therefore aimed to determine if bottlenose dolphin personality traits predict whether and how dolphins initiate contact as a rubber or rubbee during pectoral fin contact exchanges, and to identify whether the effects of personality traits …

The Return Of The Dead: Resurrecting Chappell's Family Gathering, Jonathan Moore

Master's Theses

This thesis examines Fred Chappell’s virtually overlooked collection of poetry Family Gathering (2000), and how the poems operate within the mode of the grotesque. I argue that the poems illuminate both the southern grotesque and Roland Barthes’s theory of photography’s Operator, Spectator, and Spectrum. I address Family Gathering as a family photo album full of still shots, snapshots, and even selfies, which illumines how Chappell’s use of the grotesque in this collection derives more from its original association with visual arts rather than only depicting the grotesque typically associated with characteristics deemed explicitly shocking or terrifying. I argue that …

The Impact Of The China-Australia Free Trade Agreement On Australia's Education Exports To China: A Legal And Economic Assessment, Junfang Xi, Weihuan Zhou, Heng Wang

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

As a landmark achievement in the development of the China-Australia bilateral economic relations, the China-Australia Free Trade Agreement (“ChAFTA”) achieves a higher level of liberalisation in education services compared with China's commitments under the World Trade Organisation and its other free trade agreements. However, the ChAFTA fails to relax the major regulatory barriers in China, which will remain the key obstacles to Australia's education services exports to China. Through a preliminary study and a regression analysis of the impacts of the ChAFTA on Australia's education exports to China based on available data, we show that the ChAFTA did not play …

Early Prediction Of Merged Code Changes To Prioritize Reviewing Tasks, Yuanrui Fan, Xin Xia, David Lo, Shanping Li

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Modern Code Review (MCR) has been widely used by open source and proprietary software projects. Inspecting code changes consumes reviewers much time and effort since they need to comprehend patches, and many reviewers are often assigned to review many code changes. Note that a code change might be eventually abandoned, which causes waste of time and effort. Thus, a tool that predicts early on whether a code change will be merged can help developers prioritize changes to inspect, accomplish more things given tight schedule, and not waste reviewing effort on low quality changes. In this paper, motivated by the above …

Applying Design Thinking To Student Outreach Projects: Experiences From An Information Systems School, Swapna Gottipati, Venky Shankararaman, Alan Megargel

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

As countries turn into Smart Nations, Infocom Technology plays a key role in enhancing their competitiveness through high skilled workforces. Reaching to younger generations and attracting them to computing programs such as Information Systems (IS) and Computer Science (CS) is a key challenge faced by universities. Many high quality students from junior colleges either don’t choose IS programs or choose IS programs as their last option during the application process. A School of Information Systems (SIS) from a large metropolitan university decided to implement an innovative outreach program to attract high quality high school aka Junior College (JC) students. JC …

Design And Implementation Of Decision Support For Traffic Management At Multipurpose Port Gates, Ketki Kulkarni, Hoong Chuin Lau, Hai Wang, Sathyavarathan Sivabalasingam, Trong Khiem Tran

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Effective traffic management can help port operators gain a competitive edge in service level and efficient use of limited resources. One critical aspect of traffic management is gate operations management, ensuring a good customer experience to logistic carriers and considering the impact of congestion in and around the port. In this paper, we describe the design and implementation of a decision support tool to help gate operators plan for future scenarios with fluctuating demand and limited resources. We propose a simulation optimization framework which incorporates theoretical results from queuing theory to approximate complex multi-lane multi-server systems. Our major contribution in …

An Economic Analysis Of Incentivized Positive Reviews, Jianqing Chen, Zhiling Guo, Jian Huang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

It becomes increasingly popular that some large online retailers such as Amazon open their platforms to allow third-party retail competitors to sell on their own platforms. We develop an analytical model to examine this retailer marketplace model and its business impact. We assume that a leading retailer has both valuation advantage that may come from its reputation and information advantage that may come from its brand awareness. We find that the availability of relatively low-cost advertising through social media or search engine can effectively reduce the leading retailer's information advantage, and thus be an important driving force for its strategic …

Sybmatch: Sybil Detection For Privacy-Preserving Task Matching In Crowdsourcing, Jiangang Shu, Ximeng Liu, Kan Yang, Yinghui Zhang, Xiaohua Jia, Robert H. Deng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The past decade has witnessed the rise of crowdsourcing, and privacy in crowdsourcing has also gained rising concern in the meantime. In this paper, we focus on the privacy leaks and sybil attacks during the task matching, and propose a privacy-preserving task matching scheme, called SybMatch. The SybMatch scheme can simultaneously protect the privacy of publishers and subscribers against semi-honest crowdsourcing service provider, and meanwhile support the sybil detection against greedy subscribers and efficient user revocation. Detailed security analysis and thorough performance evaluation show that the SybMatch scheme is secure and efficient.

Making A Good Thing Better: Enhancing Password/Pin-Based User Authentication With Smartwatch, Bing Chang, Yingjiu Li, Qiongxiao Wang, Wen-Tao Zhu, Robert H. Deng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Wearing smartwatches becomes increasingly popular in people’s lives. This paper shows that a smartwatch can help its bearer authenticate to a login system effectively and securely even if the bearer’s password has already been revealed. This idea is motivated by our observation that a sensor-rich smartwatch is capable of tracking the wrist motions of its bearer typing a password or PIN, which can be used as an authentication factor. The major challenge in this research is that a sophisticated attacker may imitate a user’s typing behavior as shown in previous research on keystroke dynamics based user authentication. We address this …

Pribioauth: Privacy-Preserving Biometric-Based Remote User Authentication, Yangguang Tian, Yingjiu Li, Ximeng Liu, Robert H. Deng, Binanda Sengupta

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Biometric-based remote user authentication (BRUA) is a useful primitive that allows an authorized user to remotely authenticate to a cloud server using biometrics. However, the existing BRUA solutions in the client-server setting lack certain privacy considerations. For example, authorized user's multiple sessions should not be linked while his identity remains anonymous to cloud server. In this work, we introduce an identity-concealed and unlinkable biometric-based remote user authentication framework, such that authorized users authenticate to an honest-but-curious server in an anonymous and unlinkable manner. In particular, we employ two non-colluding cloud servers to perform the complex biometrics matching. We formalize two …

Performance Trends Matter: But Why, How, And When?, Jochen Reb, Gary J. Greguras, Shenghua Luan

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

That performance is dynamic and varies over time has long been recognized. However, research is only beginning to understand the implications of dynamic performance for performance appraisals and performance-based decisions. Against this backdrop, despite what we see as serious methodological concerns (e.g., single-item measures, operationalization of variables), we believe that Schmidt (2017) makes several contributions that point to important directions for future research.

Utilizing Computational Trust To Identify Rumor Spreaders On Twitter, Bhavtosh Rath, Wei Gao, Jing Ma, Jaideep Srivastava

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Ubiquitous use of social media such as microblogging platforms opens unprecedented chances for false information to diffuse online. Facing the challenges in such a so-called “post-fact” era, it is very important for intelligent systems to not only check the veracity of information but also verify the authenticity of the users who spread the information, especially in time-critical situations such as real-world emergencies, where urgent measures have to be taken for stopping the spread of fake information. In this work, we propose a novel machine-learning-based approach for automatic identification of the users who spread rumorous information on Twitter by leveraging computational …

Commonality: A Longitudinal Study, Raja Velu, Zhaoque Zhou, Chyng Wen Tee

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

The commonality in the asset characteristics such as returns, liquidity and other non-trade parameters attracted intense research interest in the literature. In this paper, we investigate the longitudinal trend in commonality for the duration 2000-2016, an extensive that include years of boom and bust in the financial market. Our results show that while market has become more fragmented, commonality in returns has doubled over this period. This observation holds across all exchanges, with a clear trend of convergence in exchange-wide commonality over time due to increased information efficiency. We develop a unified methodology to systematically accommodate all explanatory factors for …

Attention-Based Lstm-Cnns For Uncertainty Identification On Chinese Social Media Texts, Binyang Li, Kaiming Zhou, Wei Gao, Xu Han Han, Linna Zhou

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Uncertainty identification is an important semantic processing task, which is crucial to the quality of information in terms of factuality in many techniques, e.g. topic detection, question answering. Especially in social media, the texts are written informally which are widely used in many applications, so the factuality has become a premier concern. However, existing approaches that still rely on lexical cues suffer greatly from the casual or word-of-mouth peculiarity of social media, in which the cue phrases are often expressed in sub-standard form or even omitted from sentences. To tackle these problems, this paper proposes the attention-based LSTM-CNNs for the …

Instead Of Predicting The Future, We Should Get On With Creating The Future, Shweta Midgil, Richard Smith

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

It is important to note that there is a lot of hype about “Digital Disruption” these days. We see too many organizations trying to take on the topic of “Digital” without really focusing their efforts on something that is meaningful to the people in the organization. Leaders going around talking about digital disruption or digital transformation does not serve any purpose – only creates anxiety and uncertainty. In other words, leaders would be better served to break down the topic into meaningful topics that are linked to areas of the business.

Co-Location Resistant Virtual Machine Placement In Cloud Data Centers, Amit Agarwal, Nguyen Binh Duong Ta

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Due to increasing number of avenues for conducting cross-virtual machine (VM) side-channel attacks, the security of public IaaS cloud data centers is a growing concern. These attacks allow an adversary to steal private information from a target user whose VM instance is co-located with that of the adversary. To reduce the probability of malicious co-location, we propose a novel VM placement algorithm called “Previously Co-Located Users First”. We perform a theoretical and empirical analysis of our proposed algorithm to evaluate its resource efficiency and security. Our results, obtained using real-world cloud traces containing millions of VM requests and thousands of …