Digital Commons Network^™

Egyptian Media Policies To Protect Minors From Harmful Content And Promote Positive Media Use, Nour Hussien Abu-Seada

Theses and Dissertations

Children are by far the most important asset for the future of any nation. Hence, any investment in them will not only reflect positively or negatively on their homeland and society, but maybe even the whole world. With the understanding that early childhood is an extremely important and critical stage for mental, physical and psychological development, it is highly important to constantly provide a healthy environment for young children in order to nourish those seeds that will harvest the future. Media is on the forefront means influencing peoples lives nowadays, some even consider it a source of information. Children, being …

Textual And Visual Representation Of Hijab In Internet Memes And Gifs, Omneya M. Nagib Ibrahim

Theses and Dissertations

This study provides a preliminary report of veil/hijab representation in the modern social media tools of communication; internet memes and GIFs. It bridges a gap in visual communication research by conducting an integrative -textual and visual- framing analysis of 400 memes and GIFs that used the hashtag #Hijab, to unravel the frames and stereotypes of veiled women in such online visuals. Hijabi Muslim women have been visually represented in media in overgeneralized stereotyped ways, being shown as either oppressed and subservient to others with no individual opinions, or as liberated progressives who resist western hegemony (Khan & Zahra, 2015). The …

How Isis Addresses Women From Western And Middle-Eastern Backgrounds: A Discourse Analysis, Kesmat Taha Nassar

Theses and Dissertations

Although the atrocities the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) commits against women on daily basis are no secret, hundreds of women from different parts of the world have pledged their allegiance to the terrorist group and many more are susceptible to radicalization. The group has capitalized on the opportunity the internet provides to spread their propaganda; however, this also means that it has provided researchers with a lot of accessible data to study. The focus of this thesis is on the language used in by ISIS in articles addressing women in its official online magazines. In order to …

Understanding The Experiences Of K-12 Esl Teachers Teaching Refugees In Cairo: The Case Of Sudanese And Syrian Community Schools, Diane Joseph Lakah

Theses and Dissertations

The refugee crisis has become a global crisis and concern. Refugees flee their country of origin and seek refuge in host countries, where they need to survive in a new society and culture. English language is an international language and refugees in Egypt aspire to resettle in a developed country like the United States of America or Canada where English language is a necessity for them to communicate and find job opportunities to advance their socio-economic standard. The purpose of this study is to explore and understand in depth the aspects that shape the experiences, perceptions, and roles of English …

Indigenous Knowledge: A Route To The Infusion Of Sustainable Development In Education., Ekbal Mohammed Mokhles

Theses and Dissertations

Indigenous knowledge is the unique knowledge confined to a particular community, produced in order to cope with agro-ecological and socio-economic environments. The purpose of this study is to explore the perceptions of some educators around the issue of infusing indigenous knowledge embedded in communities such as Nubia in their school curricula similar to what other models in indigenous communities in countries such as Hawaii, Brazil and Australia did to reform their curricula. The research is based on the assumption that a culture- and place-based learning in Nubia can promote the infusion of indigenous knowledge. Foucault's theory of power and knowledge …

Bodies In Dependence: A Foucauldian Genealogy Of The Americans With Disabilities Acts, Michael E. Skyer

Articles

The Americans with Disabilities Acts (ADA) of 1990 and 2008 are laws imagined as enacting two goals: enhancing civil rights and reducing sociopolitical discrimination for Americans with disabilities; however, findings from this study strongly contrast with popular assumptions about the ADA. Key findings show how the ADA legitimizes governmental control of disability through discourse to consolidate economic power. The study employs the genealogical method, derived from Foucault, which is used to identify destructive and productive operations of power and identify ambiguities in discursive regimes. The ADA constructs a discursive category of "disability," the results of which are contradictory and problematic, …

Southwest Talks: New Mexico Historical Review Interview Series, Anna Nogar

New Mexico Historical Review

No abstract provided.

To Plant A Garden Is To Believe In The Future: An Autoethnographic Journey Of Doubt And Restoration In A Co-Principalship, Arturo Abrego

Dissertations

This autoethnographic research study explored the circumstances and challenges I encountered as an educational leader during the inception of the 2001 No Child Left Behind Act. Through the use of autoethnographic vignettes, I provided an intimate account of the circumstances and conditions that led my school district to establish a co-principal leadership structure. The use of autoethnographic vignettes was not only a vehicle to tell my story but also served as an avenue for the reader to connect, conceptualize, and contextualize the circumstances and outcomes associated with this personal journey. Specifically, the stories and responses within this research are intended …

Actual Agreement, Shared Meaning Analysis, And The Invalidation Of Boilerplate: A Response To Professors Kar And Radin, Steven W. Feldman

Missouri Law Review

In their February 2019 article in the Harvard Law Review, Pseudo-Contract And Shared Meaning Analysis, Professors Robin Bradley Kar and Margaret Jane Radin argued that, notwithstanding its physical presence in the document (or on a computer screen), boilerplate without actual agreement lacks contractual force.

The authors advocated the technique of shared meaning analysis as a solution to the challenges presented by boilerplate contracts. By referring to “shared meaning,” Kar and Radin proposed that courts enforce “[t]he meaning that parties produce and agree to during contract formation that is most consistent with the presupposition that both were using language cooperatively to …

Principles And Practices Of Teaching English Language Learners, Abha Gupta

Teaching & Learning Faculty Publications

This conceptual paper presents diverse approaches and strategies for preparing competent teachers who work with either English Language Learners (ELLs) or students who speak English as a Second Language (ESL). The pedagogical approaches discussed herein include practical and hands-on activities for teachers at any level. Bilingual learning improves ELL's cognitive development as well as their self-esteem. The paper outlines underlying principles for the best practices with an emphasis on ESL students and also to other learning situations and students. Teachers can modify their instructional methods to adjust ELL's learning needs. Specifically, even though the discussion is framed in the context …

Examining Resilience In The Lives Of Black Women, Laurellé C. Warner

Loma Linda University Electronic Theses, Dissertations & Projects

Challenges and adversity are ubiquitous, but there is differential distribution by sex and social location. Women have an increased likelihood of experiencing social and biological challenges with an even greater probability among Black women because of the enduring historical context of oppression, devaluation, and inequality. As a result, Black women experience stressful and chronic strains over their changing life course, requiring early and greater adaptation and evolving regulatory processes that can lead to stress proliferation and allostatic load. Despite hardships, however, many have demonstrated historical and contemporary patterns of adapting and flourishing. This is suggestive of resilience. Yet, the extant …

Legal Area Classification: A Comparative Study Of Text Classifiers On Singapore Supreme Court Judgments, Jerrold Soh, How Khang Lim, Ian Ernst Chai

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

This paper conducts a comparative study on the performance of various machine learning(“ML”) approaches for classifying judgments into legal areas. Using a novel dataset of 6,227 Singapore Supreme Court judgments, we investigate how state-of-the-art NLP methods compare against traditional statistical models when applied to a legal corpus that comprised few but lengthy documents. All approaches tested, including topic model, word embedding, and language model-based classifiers, performed well with as little as a few hundred judgments. However, more work needs to be done to optimize state-of-the-art methods for the legal domain.

Proud To Be Thai: The Puzzling Absence Of Ethnicity-Based Political Cleavages In Northeastern Thailand, Jacob I. Ricks

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Underneath the veneer of a homogenous state-approved Thai ethnicity,Thailand is home to a heterogeneous population. Only about one-thirdof Thailand’s inhabitants speak the national language as their mothertongue; multiple alternate ethnolinguistic groups comprise the remainderof the population, with the Lao in the northeast, often called Isan people,being the largest at 28 percent of the population. Ethnic divisions closelyalign with areas of political party strength: the Thai Rak Thai Party and itssubsequent incarnations have enjoyed strong support from Isan people andKhammuang speakers in the north while the Democrat Party dominatesamong the Thai- and Paktay-speaking people of the central plains and thesouth. Despite …

Importance Sampling Of Interval Markov Chains, Cyrille Jegourel, Jingyi Wang, Jun Sun

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In real-world systems, rare events often characterize critical situations like the probability that a system fails within some time bound and they are used to model some potentially harmful scenarios in dependability of safety-critical systems. Probabilistic Model Checking has been used to verify dependability properties in various types of systems but is limited by the state space explosion problem. An alternative is the recourse to Statistical Model Checking (SMC) that relies on Monte Carlo simulations and provides estimates within predefined error and confidence bounds. However, rare properties require a large number of simulations before occurring at least once. To tackle …

Dynamic Fusion With Intra-And Inter-Modality Attention Flow For Visual Question Answering, Peng Gao, Zhengkai Jiang, Haoxuan You, Pan Lu, Steven C. H. Hoi, Xiaogang Wang, Hongsheng Li

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Learning effective fusion of multi-modality features is at the heart of visual question answering. We propose a novel method of dynamically fusing multi-modal features with intra- and inter-modality information flow, which alternatively pass dynamic information between and across the visual and language modalities. It can robustly capture the high-level interactions between language and vision domains, thus significantly improves the performance of visual question answering. We also show that the proposed dynamic intra-modality attention flow conditioned on the other modality can dynamically modulate the intramodality attention of the target modality, which is vital for multimodality feature fusion. Experimental evaluations on the …

Learning Cross-Modal Embeddings With Adversarial Networks For Cooking Recipes And Food Images, Hao Wang, Doyen Sahoo, Chenghao Liu, Ee-Peng Lim, Steven C. H. Hoi

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Food computing is playing an increasingly important role in human daily life, and has found tremendous applications in guiding human behavior towards smart food consumption and healthy lifestyle. An important task under the food-computing umbrella is retrieval, which is particularly helpful for health related applications, where we are interested in retrieving important information about food (e.g., ingredients, nutrition, etc.). In this paper, we investigate an open research task of cross-modal retrieval between cooking recipes and food images, and propose a novel framework Adversarial Cross-Modal Embedding (ACME) to resolve the cross-modal retrieval task in food domains. Specifically, the goal is to …

Dialog-Aware Language Models For Speech Recognition, Benjamin Haynor, Petar Aleksic

Defensive Publications Series

Automatic speech recognizers (ASR) typically treat each utterance of a conversation independently. This often leads to errors such as the incorrect transcription of homophones. These errors cascade into further problems when performing natural language understanding. This disclosure presents speech recognition techniques that transcribe speech using the larger context of the dialog. Per the techniques, individual utterances are transcribed based on the context of the conversation. The techniques distinguish homophones by context and improve in-dialog ASR without relying on supervised data or manually-provided phrases. The techniques generalize well to unseen dialogs or queries.

7th Annual Gsep Research Symposium, Charles Opong

Education Division Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Rethinking “Liberal Peacebuilding”: Conflict, Violence, And Peace In Mindanao, Taniguchi Miyoko

Social Transformations Journal of the Global South

Conflict and violence have prevailed over the last four decades in conflict-affected areas in Muslim Mindanao, despite the signing of several peace agreements between the Philippine government and Islamic insurgents, and peacebuilding activities on the ground. Liberal or post-liberal peacebuilding theory—that emphasizes democratic institution-building, local politics and society, and hybrid possibilities for the transformation of both the “liberal” and the “local”—is not helpful in explaining why the Philippines, known as a liberal democratic state, is unable to bring about peace in Mindanao. From a historical perspective, the paper argues that conflict, violence, and peace in Mindanao should be analyzed through …

Seeking Life Balance: The Perceptions Of Health Of Cambodian Women In Resettlement, Olivia Catolico

Dissertations

This grounded theory study was an inquiry into the perceptions of health of Cambodian women in resettlement and the conditions that influenced their perceptions. Few studies of Cambodian women who escaped political conflict exist. Cambodian women were among the waves of Southeast Asian refugees who have resettled in the United States. The sequelae of significant life trauma upon the health of Cambodian women in resettlement have received little attention in the nursing literature. There is less information about their perceptions of health in resettlement as their beliefs about health and illness causation contrast with those of Western health care providers.

A Comparative Study Of Russian Trolls Using Several Machine Learning Models On Twitter Data, Kannan Neten Dharan Kannan Neten Dharan

Theses

Ever since Russian trolls have been brought into light, their interference in the 2016 US Presidential elections has been monitored and studied thoroughly. These Russian trolls have fake accounts registered on several major social media sites to influence public opinions. Our work involves trying to discover patterns in these tweets and classifying them by using different machine learning approaches such as Support Vector Machines, Word2vec and neural network models, and then creating a benchmark to compare all the different models. Two machine learning models are developed for this purpose. The first one is used to classify any given specific tweet …

6th Annual Chapman Staff Art Exhibition, Chapman University Staff

Library Displays and Bibliographies

The Leatherby Libraries Hall of Art was established to showcase the creativity of the Chapman community. It was dedicated for this purpose in 2014 although the space has been available for staff and student exhibits since 2011. The Hall of Art is devoted exclusively to the display of student work during the academic year, and to staff art during the summer. While past staff art exhibits featured work by Leatherby Libraries staff members only, this is our fourth year opening up the exhibit to any interested staff member of Chapman University. The fifteen artists represented here demonstrate the wide variety …

Personal Reflections / 5.31.19, José M. Torres

Personal Reflections

No abstract provided.

After Implementation Of The Aca – Coverage Gaps Among Rural Latinos Still Remain, Arlesia L. Mathis, Matthew Dutton, Ivette A. López, Alan Becker, C Perry Brown

Florida Public Health Review

In this study, we assessed health needs and insurance coverage among a rural Latino population. A health needs survey was conducted in 2015 with approximately 100 Latino residents living in a rural Florida county. The survey included questions on socio-economic characteristics, type of insurance coverage, lapses in coverage, delays in care and satisfaction with health services. Only 15% of respondents had insurance through their employer, and 11% had Medicaid. Over 45% of participants had no health insurance, and 20% had no insurance for more than three years. One in ten had a medication delay due to lack of coverage/money, and …

From Word To World: Designing Children’S Literature To Empower Thoughtful Engagement In Life And Learning, Lauren Taub

Critical and Creative Thinking Capstones Collection

In this paper, I discuss the importance of a strong literacy foundation, the challenges of acquiring that foundation, and the consequences of functional illiteracy. I emphasize the role that parents and caregivers can play in establishing a positive, engaged learning disposition and ways that adopting confident thinking habits and attitudes can help children in their early learning. To facilitate these behaviors and dispositions, I have provided the early design of three original children’s stories and an accompanying parent/caregiver toolkit with questions, strategies, and activities. The aim and focus of this research is early intervention using the reading experience as an …

Promoting Global Best Practices For Sustainable Development Goals Through Library And Information Science Professionals In Nigeria, Christopher Eje Ogar Mr, Gboyega K. Oyeniran Ph.D

Library Philosophy and Practice (e-journal)

The study focused on sustainable development goals in Nigeria in line with sustainable Development Goals using some world standard practices in library and information and with librarians and other information science professionals playing leading roles. Some key concepts, namely: Global best practices, sustainable development, Goals Libraries, Information science, professionals as related to library and information science, Nigeria were conceptually defined in relation to this study. The paper highlighted the needs for sustainable development in line with sustainable development goals. Brief historical developments of sustainable development goals were x-rayed. The roles of libraries and information science professionals in integrated information and …

Soft Skills That Employers Are Seeking, Adrienne J. Royo

Faculty Works

As a university professor who wishes to discover ways in which I can enhance my students/advisees knowledge on how to prepare and plan for their future, I have executed a literature search relevant to the soft skills that employers are seeking in the graduates of the 21^st Century. The following article summaries purposely seek to elucidate this question for today’s graduates. A summary is provided at the end.

The Affective Politics Of Twitter, Johnathan C. Flowers

Computer Ethics - Philosophical Enquiry (CEPE) Proceedings

Given the increasing encroachment of Twitter into offline experience, it has become necessary to look beyond the formation of identity in online spaces to the ways in which identities surface through the formation of affective communities organized through the use of technocultural assemblages, or the platforms, algorithms, and digital networks through which affect circulates in an online space. This essay focuses on the microblogging website Twitter as one such technocultural assemblage whose hashtag functionality allows for the circulation of affect among bodies which “surface” within the affective communities organized on Twitter through their alignment with and orientation by hashtags which …

Tell Me About A Class At Risd : Classroom Experiences Of Multilingual, International Graduate Students At The Rhode Island School Of Design, Madeline Conley

Masters Theses

This thesis explores the experiences of multilingual, international graduate students at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD). Through interviews with eight international and multilingual graduate students from different RISD departments, the researcher asks students to identify what helps and hinders their learning. The author situates interviewee responses in the context of scholarly literature that examines the experiences and predicted challenges faced by multilingual international students enrolled in art and design schools and more broadly in higher education. Further, this thesis’ research questions are examined within the complexities of and ongoing conversations about creating a more equitable and inclusive RISD …

Among : A Series Of Enactments, Joel F. Kern

Masters Theses

AMONG captures the practice of a constructionist designer, one who oscillates between the characteristics of typography, multi-materiality, and spatiality yet does not attach solely to the physical or digital. The fundamental principles of this practice include open platforms that foster generative collaboration through modular systems. AMONG straddles the borders of graphic design, environmental design and social sculpture. At its core, this practice encourages new ways of connecting communities.