Digital Commons Network^™

A Conceptual Framework For Social, Behavioral, And Environmental Change Through Stakeholder Engagement In Water Resource Management, Weston M. Eaton, Kathryn J. Brasier, Mark E. Burbach, Walt Whitmer, Elyzabeth W. Engle, Morey Burnham, Barbara Quimby, Anil Kumar Chaudhary, Hannah Whitley, Jodi Delozier, Lara B. Fowler, Amber Wutich, Julia C. Bausch, Melissa Beresford, C. Clare Hinrichs, Cheryl Burkhart-Kriesel, Heather E. Preisendanz, Clinton Williams, Jack Watson, Jason Weigle

Faculty Research, Scholarly, and Creative Activity

Incorporating stakeholder engagement into environmental management may help in the pursuit of novel approaches for addressing complex water resource problems. However, evidence about how and under what circumstances stakeholder engagement enables desirable changes remains elusive. In this paper, we develop a conceptual framework for studying social and environmental changes possible through stakeholder engagement in water resource management, from inception to outcomes. We synthesize concepts from multiple literatures to provide a framework for tracing linkages from contextual conditions, through engagement process design features, to social learning, community capacity building, and behavioral change at individual, group, and group network levels, and ultimately …

Observations Of Sweep–Ejection Dynamics For Heat And Momentum Fluxes During Wildland Fires In Forested And Grassland Environments, Warren E. Heilman, Tirtha Banerjee, Craig B. Clements, Kenneth L. Clark, Shiyuan Zhong, Xindi Bian

Faculty Research, Scholarly, and Creative Activity

The vertical turbulent transfer of heat and momentum in the lower atmospheric boundary layer is accom-plished through intermittent sweep, ejection, outward interaction, and inward interaction events associated with turbulent updrafts and downdrafts. These events, collectively referred to as sweep–ejection dynamics, have been studied extensively in forested and nonforested environments and reported in the literature. However, little is known about the sweep–ejection dynamics that occur in response to turbulence regimes induced by wildland fires in forested and nonforested environments. This study attempts to fill some of that knowledge gap through analyses of turbulence data previously collected during three wildland (prescribed) fires …

"Do Users Need Human-Like Conversational Agents?" - Exploring Conversational System Design Using Framework Of Human Needs, Souvick Ghosh, Satanu Ghosh

Faculty Research, Scholarly, and Creative Activity

The fascinating story of human evolution can be attributed to our ability to speak, write, and communicate complex thoughts. When researchers envision a perfect, artificially intelligent conversational system, they want the system to be human-like. In other words, the system should converse with the same intellect and cognition as humans. Now, the question which we need to ask is if we need a human-like conversational system? Before we engage in the complex endeavor of implementing human-like characteristics, we should debate if the pursuit of such a system is logical and ethical. We analyze some of the system-level characteristics and discuss …

Malware Classification Using Long Short-Term Memory Models, Dennis Dang, Fabio Di Troia, Mark Stamp

Faculty Research, Scholarly, and Creative Activity

Signature and anomaly based techniques are the quintessential approaches to malware detection. However, these techniques have become increasingly ineffective as malware has become more sophisticated and complex. Researchers have therefore turned to deep learning to construct better performing model. In this paper, we create four different long-short term memory (LSTM) based models and train each to classify malware samples from 20 families. Our features consist of opcodes extracted from malware executables. We employ techniques used in natural language processing (NLP), including word embedding and bidirection LSTMs (biLSTM), and we also use convolutional neural networks (CNN). We find that a model …

Malware Classification With Gmm-Hmm Models, Jing Zhao, Samanvitha Basole, Mark Stamp

Faculty Research, Scholarly, and Creative Activity

Discrete hidden Markov models (HMM) are often applied to malware detection and classification problems. However, the continuous analog of discrete HMMs, that is, Gaussian mixture model-HMMs (GMM-HMM), are rarely considered in the field of cybersecurity. In this paper, we use GMM-HMMs for malware classification and we compare our results to those obtained using discrete HMMs. As features, we consider opcode sequences and entropy-based sequences. For our opcode features, GMM-HMMs produce results that are comparable to those obtained using discrete HMMs, whereas for our entropy-based features, GMM-HMMs generally improve significantly on the classification results that we have achieved with discrete HMMs.

A New Dataset For Smartphone Gesture-Based Authentication, Elliu Huang, Fabio Di Troia, Mark Stamp, Preethi Sundaravaradhan

Faculty Research, Scholarly, and Creative Activity

In this paper, we consider the problem of authentication on a smartphone, based on gestures. Specifically, the gestures consist of users holding a smartphone while writing their initials in the air. Accelerometer data from 80 subjects was collected and we provide a preliminary analysis of this data using machine learning techniques. The machine learning techniques considered include principal component analysis (PCA) and support vector machines (SVM). The results presented here are intended to provide a baseline for additional research based on our dataset.

Malware Classification With Word Embedding Features, Aparna Sunil Kale, Fabio Di Troia, Mark Stamp

Faculty Research, Scholarly, and Creative Activity

Malware classification is an important and challenging problem in information security. Modern malware classification techniques rely on machine learning models that can be trained on features such as opcode sequences, API calls, and byte n-grams, among many others. In this research, we consider opcode features. We implement hybrid machine learning techniques, where we engineer feature vectors by training hidden Markov models—a technique that we refer to as HMM2Vec—and Word2Vec embeddings on these opcode sequences. The resulting HMM2Vec and Word2Vec embedding vectors are then used as features for classification algorithms. Specifically, we consider support vector machine (SVM), k-nearest neighbor (k-NN), random …

Proton Pump Inhibitors And Chronic Kidney Disease: Reevaluating The Evidence From A Randomized Controlled Trial, B. Burt Gerstman

Faculty Research, Scholarly, and Creative Activity

No abstract provided.

Time Enough For Counting: A Unicorn Retrospective, Abraham Cable

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Open Problems In Extracellular Rna Data Analysis: Insights From An Ercc Online Workshop, Roger P Alexander, Robert R Kitchen, Juan Pablo Tosar, Matthew Roth, Pieter Mestdagh, Klaas E A Max, Joel Rozowsky, Karolina Elżbieta Kaczor-Urbanowicz, Justin Chang, Leonora Balaj, Bojan Losic, Eric L Van Nostrand, Emily Laplante, Bogdan Mateescu, Brian S White, Rongshan Yu, Aleksander Milosavljevic, Gustavo Stolovitzky, Ryan M Spengler

Faculty, Staff and Students Publications

We now know RNA can survive the harsh environment of biofluids when encapsulated in vesicles or by associating with lipoproteins or RNA binding proteins. These extracellular RNA (exRNA) play a role in intercellular signaling, serve as biomarkers of disease, and form the basis of new strategies for disease treatment. The Extracellular RNA Communication Consortium (ERCC) hosted a two-day online workshop (April 19–20, 2021) on the unique challenges of exRNA data analysis. The goal was to foster an open dialog about best practices and discuss open problems in the field, focusing initially on small exRNA sequencing data. Video recordings of workshop …

Achieving Scaled And Sustained Use Of Client-Based Projects In Business School Marketing Education: A Proposed Suprastructure, Doreen E. Shanahan, Lynda H. Palmer, Jim Salas

All Faculty Open Access Publications

Business scholars agree that well-constructed experiential learning and specifically client-based projects (CBP) provide an opportunity for students to apply concepts they learn to solve particular problems. As an additional outcome, they provide value for multiple stakeholders including the client, business community, university, and the instructor. However, CBP’s can be inherently complex and demanding on instructors, impeding adoption and sustained use. As critical participatory action researchers, we worked collaboratively with faculty within our marketing department to examine and address the challenges of scaling capacity to support, effectively replicate, and grow use of CBPs in our business school marketing courses and subsequently …

Increasing Workplace Diversity: Evidence From A Recruiting Experiment At A Fortune 500 Company, Jeffrey A. Flory, Andreas Leibbrandt, Christina Rott, Olga B. Stoddard

Faculty Publications

While many firms have set ambitious goals to increase diversity in their ranks, there is a dearth of empirical evidence on effective ways to reach them. We use a natural field experiment to test several hypotheses on effective means to attract minority candidates for top professional careers. By randomly varying the content in recruiting materials of a major financial services corporation with more than 10,000 employees, we find that signaling explicit interest in employee diversity more than doubles the interest in openings among racial minority candidates, as well as the likelihood that they apply and are selected. Impacts on gender …

Rationalizing Self-Defeating Behaviors: Theory And Evidence, Lars J. Lefgren, Olga B. Stoddard

Faculty Publications

Why do individuals engage in self-defeating behaviors like self-harm, addiction, and risky sexual behaviors? Why do they experience the apathy of depression or inaction when trapped by multiple competing problems? We propose a framework for explaining these and other related behaviors based on the insight that individuals can only experience a limited number of latent stimuli to which they are exposed. We conduct an experiment to test this model and find that more than two thirds of the subjects behave consistent with our theoretical framework.

Perceived Family And Partner Support And The Work-Family Interface: A Meta-Analytic Review, Heather H. Kelley, Ashley B. Lebaron, E. Jeffery Hill, Diana Meter

Faculty Publications

This study employed meta-analytic techniques to elucidate the role of perceived partner and family support in four measures of the work-family interface. We extracted 183 effect sizes from 82 samples and a total of N = 36,226 individuals. We found perceived familial (partner and family) support was negatively associated with work-to-family conflict (r = -.099) and family-to-work conflict (r = -.178). It was positively associated with work-to-family enrichment (r = .173) and family-to-work enrichment (r = .378). Various sample-level moderators were investigated through meta regression and subgroup analyses, including whether the support measure was family or partner focused. Perceived family …

Mother Goose As A Resource In Teaching Historical Linguistics, Dallin D. Oaks

Faculty Publications

Mother Goose and other nursery rhymes as authentic texts are valuable resources that can be used effectively to illustrate historical English language change. Even though these nursery rhymes contain some forms, structures, and word meanings that differ from the language of today, the texts are sufficiently recent that they are intelligible to modern audiences. This article will illustrate the relevance and usefulness of nursery rhymes in teaching about principles of language and language change, such as voicing, phonological processes, factors motivating phonological change, as well as actual changes in the phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, and lexicon of English.

Treating Children Exposed To Domestic Violence: Group-Based Intervention, Gary M. Burlingame, Rachel A. Arnold

Faculty Publications

D omestic violence is a serious societal problem that sadly threatens many children. Results from the National Survey of Children’s Exposure to Violence (NatSCEV) demonstrate that nearly 26% of children are exposed to family violence during their lifetime, including psychological/emotional intimate partner violence, physical intimate partner violence, parental assault of a sibling, and/or other family violence (Hamby et al., 2011). The consequences can be significant. For instance, childhood exposure to intimate partner violence is associated with mental health issues, such as posttraumatic stress and anxiety symptoms (Hamby et al., 2011). While rates of domestic violence have been declining in the …

Association Between Toxoplasma Gondii Seropositivity And Serointensity And Brain Volume In Adults: A Cross-Sectional Study, Bruce L. Brown, Lance D. Erickson, Shawn D. Gale, Dawson W. Hedges

Faculty Publications

The intracellular protozoal parasite Toxoplasma gondii has been associated with worsened cognitive function in animal models and in humans. Despite these associations, the mechanisms by which Toxoplasma gondii might affect cognitive function remain unknown, although Toxoplasma gondii does produce physiologically active intraneuronal cysts and appears to affect dopamine synthesis. Using data from the UK Biobank, we sought to determine whether Toxoplasma gondii is associated with decreased prefrontal, hippocampal, and thalamic gray-matter volumes and with decreased total gray-matter and total white-matter volumes in an adult community-based sample. The results from adjusted multivariable regression modelling showed no associations between Toxoplasma gondii and …

Back Vowel Dynamics And Distinctions In Southern American English, Joseph A. Stanley, Margaret E. L. Renwick, Katherine Ireland Kuiper, Rachel M. Olen

Faculty Publications

Southern American English is spoken in a large geographic region in the United States. Its characteristics include back-vowel fronting (e.g., in goose, foot, and goat), which has been ongoing since the mid-nineteenth century; meanwhile, the low back vowels (in lot and thought) have recently merged in some areas. We investigate these five vowels in the Digital Archive of Southern Speech, a legacy corpus of linguistic interviews with sixty-four speakers born 1886-1956. We extracted 89,367 vowel tokens and used generalized additive mixed-effects models to test for socially-driven changes to both their relative phonetic placements and the shapes of their formant trajectories. …

The Effects Of Metacognitive Listening Strategy Instruction On Esl Learners’ Listening Motivation, Grant Eckstein, Corbin Kalanikiakahi Rivera, Benjamin L. Mcmurry, David Eddington

Faculty Publications

Prior studies examining the effects of listening strategy instruction on motivation have shown a positive correlation between the two. However, the participants of these studies all shared a first language (L1) and were not enrolled in an intensive English program (IEP). This study aims to investigate the correlation between listening strategy instruction and listening motivation in an IEP classroom for students from different L1s. Listening motivation was recorded utilizing the English Listening Comprehension Motivation Scale (ELCMS), and strategy use was tracked with the Metacognitive Awareness Listening Questionnaire (MALQ). Pre- and post-test scores of 56 participants (control group, n=30; experiment group, …

Repeated Word Production Is Inconsistent In Both Aphasia And Apraxia Of Speech, Tyson G. Harmon, Katarina L. Haley, Kevin T. Cunningham, Adam Jacks, Jessica D. Richardson, Peter E. Turkeltaub

Faculty Publications

Purpose: There is persistent uncertainty about whether sound error consistency is a valid criterion for differentiating between apraxia of speech (AOS) and aphasia with phonemic paraphasia. The purpose of this study was to determine whether speakers with a profile of aphasia and AOS differ in error consistency from speakers with aphasia who do not have AOS. By accounting for differences in overall severity and using a sample size well over three times that of the largest study on the topic to date, our ambition was to resolve the existing controversy.

Method: We analyzed speech samples from 171 speakers …

Spoken Discourse Assessment And Analysis In Aphasia: An International Survey Of Current Practices, Tyson G. Harmon, Brielle C. Stark, Manaswita Dutta, Laura L. Murray, Davida Fromm, Lucy Bryant

Faculty Publications

Purpose

Spoken discourse analysis is commonly employed in the assessment and treatment of people living with aphasia, yet there is no standardization in assessment, analysis, or reporting procedures, thereby precluding comparison/meta-analyses of data and hindering replication of findings. An important first step is to identify current practices in collecting and analyzing spoken discourse in aphasia. Thus, this study surveyed current practices, with the goal of working toward standardizing spoken discourse assessment first in research settings with subsequent implementation into clinical settings.

Method

A mixed-methods (quantitative and qualitative) survey was publicized to researchers and clinicians around the globe who have collected …

Kinematic And Acoustic Changes To Vowels And Diphthongs In Bite Block Speech, Christopher Dromey, Michelle Richins, Tanner Low

Faculty Publications

Purpose: We examined the effect of bite block insertion (BBI) on lingual movements and formant frequencies in corner vowel and diphthong production in a sentence context. Method: Twenty young adults produced the corner vowels (/u/, /ɑ/, /æ/, /i/) and the diphthong /ɑɪ/ in sentence contexts before and after BBI. An electromagnetic articulograph measured the movements of the tongue back, middle, and front. Results: There were significant decreases in the acoustic vowel articulation index and vowel space area following BBI. The kinematic vowel articulation index decreased significantly for the back and middle of the tongue but not for the front. There …

A Longitudinal Study Of Interprofessional Education In Graduate Students From Rehabilitation Sciences, Sarah Elkington, Connie Summers, Celia Pechak, Patricia Lara, Francesca Hernandez

Faculty Publications

• Date Presented Accepted for AOTA INSPIRE 2021 but unable to be presented due to online event limitations. A longitudinal study evaluated the effects of interprofessional education (IPE) experiences on 71 rehabilitation science graduate students' perceptions of interprofessional collaboration (IPC). Physical therapy, OT, and speech-language pathology students rated their perceptions of IPC and their knowledge of other disciplines' roles across their first year of graduate school. IPE experiences are an important aspect of professional preparation. Primary Author and Speaker: Sarah Elkington Contributing Authors: Connie Summers, Celia Pechak, Patricia Lara, and Francesca Hernandez

Mindfulness, Self-Inquiry, And Artmaking, Mark Graham, Rebecca Lewis

Faculty Publications

This article describes a qualitative study of pre-service art education students that was designed to explore relationships between mindfulness, self-inquiry, and artistic practices. The researchers, who are art educators, were curious about how mindfulness practices might connect, overlap or influence the personal artistic practice of the participants. Although mindfulness is often used as an intervention to counter the stresses of school and teaching, mindfulness can also be thought of as a counter cultural phenomenon that explores possibilities of a critical pedagogy. While mindfulness and self-care practices can have important positive benefits and may lead to deeper personal understanding, these practices …

Covid-19 And The Workplace: Implications, Issues, And Insights For Future Research And Action, Kevin M. Kniffin, Jayanth Narayanan, Frederik Anseel, John Antonakis, Susan P. Ashford, Arnold B. Bakker, Peter Bamberger, Hari Bapuji, Devasheesh P. Bhave, Virginia K. Choi, Stefanie J. Creary, Evangelia Demerouti, Francis J. Flynn, Michele J. Gelfand, Lindred L. Greer, Gary Johns, Selin Kesebir, Peter G. Klein, Sun Young Lee, Hakan Ozcelik, Jennifer Louise Petriglieri, Nancy P. Rothbard, Cort W. Rudolph, Jason D. Shaw, Nina Sirola

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

COVID-19’s impacts on workers and workplaces across the globe have been dramatic. We present a broad review of prior research rooted in work and organizational psychology, and related fields, for making sense of the implications for employees, teams, and work organizations. Our review and preview of relevant literatures focuses on: (i) emerging changes in work practices (e.g., working from home, virtual teams) and (ii) economic and social psychological impacts (e.g, unemployment, mental well-being). In addition, we examine the potential moderating factors of age, race and ethnicity, gender, family status, personality, andcultural differences to generate disparate effects. Illustrating the benefits of …

Prompt-Specificity In Scenario-Based Assessments: Associations With Personality Versus Knowledge And Effects On Predictive Validity, Thomas Rockstuhl, Filip Lievens

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Many scenario-based assessments (e.g., interviews, assessment center exercises, work samples, simulations, and situational judgment tests) use prompts (i.e., cues provided to respondents to increase the likelihood that the information received from them is clear, sufficient, and job-related). However, a dilemma for practitioners and researchers is how general or specific one should prompt people's answers. We posit that such differences in prompt-specificity (i.e., extent to which prompts cue performance criteria) have important implications for the predictive validity of scenario-based assessment scores. Drawing on the interplay of situation construal and situational strength theory, we propose that prompt-specificity leads to differential relationships between …

Were There Fire Sales In The Rmbs Market?, Craig B. Merrill, Taylor Nadauld, René M. Stulz, Shane M. Sherlun

Faculty Publications

Many observers have argued that the fall in RMBS prices during the crisis was partly caused by fire sales. Using a unique dataset of RMBS transactions for insurance compa- nies, we show evidence supportive of a role, at the transaction level, of forced sales that occurred at discounted prices relative to fundamentals, and find that the RMBS market behaved as a whole as would be expected in the presence of fire sales. We show that risk- sensitive capital requirements and mark-to-market accounting can jointly create incentives for financial institutions subject to adverse capital shocks to sell stressed securities.

An Empirical Analysis Of Video Games And Social Media On Learning In An Information Systems University Class, Heber C. Brau, James C. Brau, James Gaskin

Faculty Publications

Prior research by Brau, et al. (2016, 2017) identifies factors that correlate with university student course grades. We employ the same research structure as the Brau, et al. papers with the innovation of adding dozens of questions that deal with video game and social media usage. Extant research argues that time spent on video gaming and using social media can: 1) hurt student grades, 2) help student grades, or 3) have no impact on student grades. We test the video game and social media impact hypotheses using a survey of over 500 college students in an Introduction to Information Systems …

Soft Information And The Underpricing Of Reit Seasoned Equity Offerings, James C. Brau, J. Troy Carpenter, James E. Cicon, Shelly Howton

Faculty Publications

Using a sample of 1,429 seasoned equity offerings (SEOs) by real estate investment trusts (REITs), we use content analysis to test whether the soft information in a company’s offering prospectus influences SEO underpricing. After controlling for relevant variables, we find that companies that use more positive (negative) words in their filings are negatively (positively) related to SEO underpricing. We posit that in REIT SEOs more positive and fewer negative words decrease investor pricing uncertainty (fear) of the offer and as a result experience less underpricing.

Market Predators, Lauren Cohen, Karl B. Diether, Christopher Malloy

Faculty Publications

We find evidence of predatory trading in the corporate bond market. Exploiting novel data on the short selling behavior of institutional investors, we demonstrate that short sellers target those bonds likely to experience the largest negative events in the future: bonds about to be downgraded to junk status, and specifically those held by insurance companies and other institutions that are required to liquidate when bonds fall to junk status. We show that shorting in these bonds predicts large negative returns, which largely reverse over the next year. Short sellers’ trading activity is premeditated: they build up large short positions in …