Digital Commons Network^™

A Typology Of Perceived Negative Course Evaluations, Heather Carmack, Leah E. Lefebvre

Journal of the Association for Communication Administration

Instructors and administrators continue to debate the merit and value of using course evaluations to assess instructor effectiveness and course outcomes, especially when students see course evaluations as satisfaction surveys where they can unload negative and/or hurtful comments directed at instructors. Little is known about instructors’ perceptions of negative course evaluations. This study qualitatively examined faculty’s (N = 90) perceptions of negative course evaluation qualitative comments. Using a grounded analyst-constructed typologies approach, three types of negative course evaluation comments were identified: professional, personal, and performance. These types of negative comments call into question the disconnection between what students and instructors …

Journal Of The Association For Communication Administration: Complete Volume 40

Journal of the Association for Communication Administration

This is the complete volume of JACA Volume 40.

Self-Efficacy And Research Output Among Librarians In Polytechnic Libraries In South-South, Nigeria, Osaheni Oni Cln, Esharenana E. Adomi

Library Philosophy and Practice (e-journal)

Purpose: This article examines the self-efficacy and research output of librarians in polytechnic libraries in South-South Nigeria.

Design, methodology, and approach: This study adopted an ex-post facto research design and used a questionnaire to collect data from librarians in Polytechnic Libraries in South-South, Nigeria.

Findings: This study showed a moderate relationship between self-efficacy and the research output of librarians in polytechnic libraries in southern Nigeria. The study also revealed that self-efficacy will significantly predict research output among librarians in polytechnic libraries in southern Nigeria.

Originality/value: This study generated significant findings that are capable of encouraging polytechnic management …

An Empirical Analysis Of The Impact Of Covid-19 On Trade: Evidence From A Small Island African Economy, Z Khan Jaffur, V Tandrayen-Ragoobur, B Seetanah

Journal of African Trade

This study investigates the potential impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic and related containment measures on the trade system of Mauritius for the period January 2010 to June 2021. As the pandemic spread across the globe due to high interconnectedness across countries, authorities has also established stringent health containment measures in the form of restrictions on people and businesses to slow the propagation of the virus. Being a small island economy highly dependent on international trade, Mauritius also faced the brunt of the pandemic which disrupted its economic activities and trade flows with its main trading partners. COVID-19 incidence and lockdown …

Stochastic Tumor-Immune Interaction Model With External Treatments And Time Delays: An Optimal Control Problem, H. J. Alsakaji, F. A. Rihan, K. Udhayakumar, F. El Ktaibi

All Works

Herein, we discuss an optimal control problem (OC-P) of a stochastic delay differential model to describe the dynamics of tumor-immune interactions under stochastic white noises and external treatments. The required criteria for the existence of an ergodic stationary distribution and possible extinction of tumors are obtained through Lyapunov functional theory. A stochastic optimality system is developed to reduce tumor cells using some control variables. The study found that combining white noises and time delays greatly affected the dynamics of the tumor-immune interaction model. Based on numerical results, it can be shown which variables are optimal for controlling tumor growth and …

An Exploration Of Human And Platform Intra-Actions In A Digital Teaching And Learning Environment, Sarah Julia Calderwood

All Works

This study uses a sociomaterial critical posthuman paradigm to examine possibilities, constraints, and tensions that come into view in the ‘intra-action’ between teachers and a digital environment. It considers how teacher subjectivities may be reimagined in new digitised visuospatial environments. This qualitative study utilises reflective interviews with things to illuminate general issues of subjectivities in human/digital contexts in a newly adopted Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) at a university in the Middle East. The interviews reveal several diffractions from the new entanglement created by introducing the new VLE. This highlights what it means to be a higher education educator in the …

Resilience, Crisis Management And Continuous Improvement Against The Impact Of Covid-19 On Employees’ Engagement And Emotions. Insights From A Cypriot Sme, Christina Nizamidou

All Works

COVID-19 forced governments and organizations to navigate unchartered waters and shift to remote work to prevent its spreading, aiming to be resilient and maintain their sustainability. Recent research showed that COVID-19 impacted employees’ engagement and emotions. As every crisis is unique and every organization experiences a crisis differently, this study adopts the single-case study research method to understand better how a Cypriot SME in the financial service dealt with COVID-19 and its aftermath. By interviewing multiple employees from all hierarchical levels, it assesses the company’s level of resilience. Moreover, it demonstrates the company’s challenges to preserve its commitment to continuous …

Overhead Based Cluster Scheduling Of Mixed Criticality Systems On Multicore Platform, Amjad Ali, Asad Masood Khattak, Shahid Iqbal, Omar Alfandi, Bashir Hayat, Muhammad Hameed Siddiqi, Adil Khan

All Works

The cluster-based technique is gaining focus for scheduling tasks of mixed-criticality (MC) real-time multicore systems. In this technique, the cores of the MC system are distributed in groups known as clusters. When all cores are distributed in clusters, the tasks are partitioned into clusters, which are scheduled on the cores within each cluster using a global approach. In this study, a cluster-based technique is adopted for scheduling tasks of real-time mixed-criticality systems (MCS). The Decreasing Criticality Decreasing Utilization with the worst-fit (DCDU-WF) technique is used for partitioning of tasks to clusters, whereas a novel mixed-criticality cluster-based boundary fair (MC-Bfair) scheduling …

Lstda: Link Stability And Transmission Delay Aware Routing Mechanism For Flying Ad-Hoc Network (Fanet), Farman Ali, Khalid Zaman, Babar Shah, Tariq Hussain, Habib Ullah, Altaf Hussain, Daehan Kwak

All Works

The paper presents a new protocol called Link Stability and Transmission Delay Aware (LSTDA) for Flying Ad-hoc Network (FANET) with a focus on network corridors (NC). FANET consists of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) that face challenges in avoiding transmission loss and delay while ensuring stable communication. The proposed protocol introduces a novel link stability with network corridors priority node selection to check and ensure fair communication in the entire network. The protocol uses a Red-Black (R-B) tree to achieve maximum channel utilization and an advanced relay approach. The paper evaluates LSTDA in terms of End-to-End Delay (E2ED), Packet Delivery Ratio …

Explainable Machine Learning For Evapotranspiration Prediction, Bamory Koné, Rima Grati, Bassem Bouaziz, Khouloud Boukadi

All Works

No abstract provided.

Flexible Global Aggregation And Dynamic Client Selection For Federated Learning In Internet Of Vehicles, Tariq Qayyum, Zouheir Trabelsi, Asadullah Tariq, Muhammad Ali, Kadhim Hayawi, Irfan Ud Din

All Works

Federated Learning (FL) enables collaborative and privacy-preserving training of machine learning models within the Internet of Vehicles (IoV) realm. While FL effectively tackles privacy concerns, it also imposes significant resource requirements. In traditional FL, trained models are transmitted to a central server for global aggregation, typically in the cloud. This approach often leads to network congestion and bandwidth limitations when numerous devices communicate with the same server. The need for Flexible Global Aggregation and Dynamic Client Selection in FL for the IoV arises from the inherent characteristics of IoV environments. These include diverse and distributed data sources, varying data quality, …

Financial Technology In Egypt Between Opportunities And Challenges, Fady Tawakol

All Works

In Egypt, the Central Bank of Egypt is working to launch a new phase of financial technology, as one of the pillars of promotion of economic reform, and an effective and supportive mechanism for integrating the informal economy for individuals and institutions within the structure of the official economy of the state, and a way to Reality to raise and improve the standard of living and reduce poverty rates by containing certain segments of society from the marginalized, low-income and owners of small, medium and micro enterprises. The methodologies used explain the current state of financial inclusion and financial technology …

Dual Sourcing Inventory Management With Nonconsecutive Lead Times From A Supply Chain Perspective: A Numerical Study, Younes Hamdouch, Youssef Boulaksil, Kilani Ghoudi

All Works

We study a stochastic multi-period two-echelon dual sourcing inventory system where the buyer can source a product from two different suppliers: a regular and an expedited supplier. The regular supplier is a low-cost offshore supplier, whereas the expedited supplier is a responsive nearshore supplier. Such dual sourcing inventory systems have been well studied in the literature, mostly being solely evaluated from the buyer’s perspective. Since the buyer’s decisions have an impact on the supply chain profit, we adopt the perspective of the entire supply chain, i.e., by taking the suppliers explicitly into consideration. In addition, we study this system for …

Application Of A Gene Modular Approach For Clinical Phenotype Genotype Association And Sepsis Prediction Using Machine Learning In Meningococcal Sepsis, Asrar Rashid, Arif R. Anwary, Feras Al-Obeidat, Joe Brierley, Mohammed Uddin, Hoda Alkhzaimi, Amrita Sarpal, Mohammed Toufiq, Zainab A. Malik, Raziya Kadwa, Praveen Khilnani, M. Guftar Shaikh, Govind Benakatti, Javed Sharief, Syed Ahmed Zaki, Abdulrahman Zeyada, Ahmed Al-Dubai, Wael Hafez, Amir Hussain

All Works

Sepsis is a major global health concern causing high morbidity and mortality rates. Our study utilized a Meningococcal Septic Shock (MSS) temporal dataset to investigate the correlation between gene expression (GE) changes and clinical features. The research used Weighted Gene Co-expression Network Analysis (WGCNA) to establish links between gene expression and clinical parameters in infants admitted to the Pediatric Critical Care Unit with MSS. Additionally, various machine learning (ML) algorithms, including Support Vector Machine (SVM), Naive Bayes, K-Nearest Neighbors (KNN), Decision Tree, Random Forest, and Artificial Neural Network (ANN) were implemented to predict sepsis survival. The findings revealed a transition …

Fuzzy Logic-Based Approach For Location Identification And Routing In The Outdoor Environment, Saravjeet Singh, Jaiteg Singh, Sukhjit Singh Sehra, Babar Shah, Farman Ali, Daehan Kwak

All Works

Finding the precise and accurate location of devices on road networks is challenging in remote areas with poor internet connectivity and Global Positioning System coverage. Navigation applications that completely depend on the internet and reference spatial data for location identification and mapping do not perform well in case of frequent internet disconnection. These reference spatial data sources have many associated challenges like large size, errors in data, and restricted access. To address these challenges, this paper provides an approach for localization and routing using self-generated reference data using likelihood estimation. According to the proposed approach, the trajectory information is used …

Design And Delivery Of National Housing In The Uae: An Alternative Approach, Basem Eid Mohamed, Mohamed Elkaftangui, Rana Zureikat, Rund Hiyasat

All Works

The provision of national housing to citizens in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) is considered a crucial topic. Over the past four decades, the process of developing national housing has emerged into multiple housing programs and schemes, all with the same aim of offering affordable and high-quality housing to citizens, in addition to meeting the needs of local families regarding spatial configurations while maintaining cultural values. However, despite all these efforts, the question has always remained: are the offered housing practices suited for family needs, socioeconomic trends, and environmental challenges? This study aims to offer an alternative approach for the …

Green Synthesis Of Lead Oxide Nanoparticles For Photo-Electrocatalytic And Antimicrobial Applications, Zia Ul Haq Khan, Noor Shad Gul, Faisal Mehmood, Sana Sabahat, Nawshad Muhammad, Abdur Rahim, Jibran Iqbal, Syed Khasim, Mohamed Abdel Salam, Taj Malook Khan, Jianbo Wu

All Works

Synthesis of nanoparticles (NPs) for many different uses requires the development of environmentally friendly synthesis protocols. In this article, we present a simple and environmentally friendly method to synthesize lead oxide (PbO) NPs from the plant material of the Mangifera indica. Analytical techniques such as spectroscopy, X-ray diffraction, and microscopy were used to characterize the synthesized PbO NPs, and their photo-electrocatalytic and antifungal properties were also evaluated. H2O2 was used to investigate the efficacy of removing methylene blue dye. At a range of pH values, H2O2 was used to study the role of hydroxyl radicals in the breakdown of methylene …

Indigenously Produced Biochar Retains Fertility In Sandy Soil Through Unique Microbial Diversity Sustenance: A Step Toward The Circular Economy, Munawwar Ali Khan, Alsayeda Zahra Salman, Shams Tabrez Khan

All Works

Introduction: Agricultural productivity in the arid hot desert climate of UAE is limited by the unavailability of water, high temperature, and salt stresses. Growing enough food under abiotic stresses and decreasing reliance on imports in an era of global warming are a challenge. Biochar with high water and nutrient retention capacity and acid neutralization activity is an attractive soil conditioner. This study investigates the microbial community in the arid soil of Dubai under shade house conditions irrigated with saline water and the shift in the microbial community, following 1 year of amendment with indigenously prepared biochar from date palm waste. …

Incidental Adaptation: The Role Of Non-Climate Regulations, Antonio M. Bento, Noah Miller, Mehreen Mookerjee, Edson Severnini

All Works

When a non-climate institution, policy, or regulation corrects a pre-existing market failure that would be exacerbated by climate change, it may also incidentally induce climate adaptation. This regulation-induced adaptation can have large positive welfare effects. We develop a tractable analytical framework of a corrective regulation where the market failure interacts with climate, highlighting the mechanism of regulation-induced adaptation: reductions in the climate-exacerbated effects of pre-existing market failures. We demonstrate this empirically for the US from 1980 to 2013, showing that ambient ozone concentrations increase with rising temperatures, but that such increase is attenuated in counties that are out of attainment …

Evolving Market Infrastructures: The Case Of Assetization In Uk Social Housing, Thomas Wainwright, Graham Manville

All Works

Researchers in economic geography have recently turned to examine the rental sector, particularly how institutional investors have begun to reshape the provision of housing. Following the politics of financialization, the built environment and social relations surrounding residential accommodation have been reconfigured to maximize opportunities for capital accumulation. While scholars have further developed their interest in rental markets, by directing their attention to the financialization of social housing, this burgeoning area remains comparatively understudied, particularly concerning the metrics that are crucial in facilitating assetization. In our article, we seek to provide new insight into the financialization of UK housing associations, to …

Dynamic Data Sample Selection And Scheduling In Edge Federated Learning, Mohamed Adel Serhani, Haftay Gebreslasie Abreha, Asadullah Tariq, Mohammad Hayajneh, Yang Xu, Kadhim Hayawi

All Works

Federated Learning (FL) is a state-of-the-art paradigm used in Edge Computing (EC). It enables distributed learning to train on cross-device data, achieving efficient performance, and ensuring data privacy. In the era of Big Data, the Internet of Things (IoT), and data streaming, challenges such as monitoring and management remain unresolved. Edge IoT devices produce and stream huge amounts of sample sources, which can incur significant processing, computation, and storage costs during local updates using all data samples. Many research initiatives have improved the algorithm for FL in homogeneous networks. However, in the typical distributed learning application scenario, data is generated …

Association Of The Gut Microbiota With Clinical Variables In Obese And Lean Emirati Subjects, Manal Ali Ahmad, Mirey Karavetian, Carole Ayoub Moubareck, Gabi Wazz, Tarek Mahdy, Koen Venema

All Works

Background: Growing evidence supports the role of gut microbiota in obesity, yet exact associations remain largely unknown. Specifically, very little is known about this association in the Emirati population. Methods: We explored differences in gut microbiota composition, particularly the Firmicutes/Bacteroidetes (F/B) ratio, between 43 obese and 31 lean adult Emirate counterparts, and its association with obesity markers, by using V3-V4 regions of 16 S ribosomal RNA gene sequencing data. Furthermore, we collected anthropometric and biochemical data. Results: The two major phyla in obese and lean groups were Firmicutes and Bacteroidetes. We observed a significantly lower alpha diversity (Shannon index) in …

Covid-19 Pandemic And The Cyberthreat Landscape: Research Challenges And Opportunities, Heba Saleous, Muhusina Ismail, Saleh H. Aldaajeh, Nisha Madathil, Saed Alrabaee, Kim Kwang Raymond Choo, Nabeel Al-Qirim

All Works

Although cyber technologies benefit our society, there are also some related cybersecurity risks. For example, cybercriminals may exploit vulnerabilities in people, processes, and technologies during trying times, such as the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, to identify opportunities that target vulnerable individuals, organizations (e.g., medical facilities), and systems. In this paper, we examine the various cyberthreats associated with the COVID-19 pandemic. We also determine the attack vectors and surfaces of cyberthreats. Finally, we will discuss and analyze the insights and suggestions generated by different cyberattacks against individuals, organizations, and systems.

Air Quality Improvement Following Covid-19 Lockdown Measures And Projected Benefits For Environmental Health, Yuei An Liou, Trong Hoang Vo, Kim Anh Nguyen, James P. Terry

All Works

Many regions worldwide suffer from heavy air pollution caused by particulate matter (PM2.5) and nitrogen dioxide (NO2), resulting in a huge annual disease burden and significant welfare costs. Following the outbreak of the COVID-19 global pandemic, enforced curfews and restrictions on human mobility (so-called periods of ‘lockdown’) have become important measures to control the spread of the virus. This study aims to investigate the improvement in air quality following COVID-19 lockdown measures and the projected benefits for environmental health. China was chosen as a case study. The work projects annual premature deaths and welfare costs by integrating PM2.5 and NO2 …

Design Of Block Copolymer With Tunable Hydrophobic/Hydrophilic/Fluorophilic Interactions, Tatiane De Fatima Dutra

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

Block copolymers (BCP) with balanced interactions and their resultant bulk-phase self-assembly have become increasingly important in advancing nanotechnology, separation, and energy applications. However, a few reports have addressed the synthesis challenge and bulk-phase self-assembly of such triblock copolymers. This thesis presents a facile route for preparing triblock copolymer via controlled radical and organocatalytic ring-opening polymerization that allows precise control over the incorporation of individual moieties in resultant polymer, responsible for balanced hydrophilic, hydrophobic/lipophilic, and fluorophilic interactions. Synthesized polymer with suggested self-assembled 2D lamellar nanostructure exhibits high-temperature stability. The long-term goal of this work is to selectively use this polymer class …

A Functioning Code May Not Be A Secure Code : A Preliminary Study On The Students' Complacency With Secure Coding, Jeremiah Niiquaye Kotey

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

Eleanor Roosevelt once said: "Learn from the mistakes of others. You can’t live long enough to make them all yourself". Mistakes are almost inevitable while coding or designing a system. Therefore, patches are created to fix the issues in the code either by a manual review, or through a static analysis tool. Oftentimes, mistakes in programming emanate from lack of skills thus, competence with a particular programming language but negligence also plays a role in other instances. A functioning code that solves a particular problem does not guarantee that the code is secure, hence the code should be structured to …

Ecocriticism And The Young Adult Audience In Dry And The Islands At The End Of The World, Nicole Marie Sysyn

Theses, Dissertations and Culminating Projects

This thesis focuses on exploring and analyzing two young adult novels through an ecocritical lens. The authors of the young adult novels, Dry and The Islands at the End of the Earth, bring awareness to young readers about the progression of global warming and effects this devastation has on humans and animals. Both of these novels show character’s relationships with nature, decision making skills in terms of crisis, and coping mechanisms which can translate to young readers. There is a great balance of teaching young readers the importance of their own relationship with the environment and how to cope in …

Facial Expression Recognition Using Lightweight Deep Learning Modeling, Mubashir Ahmad, Saira, Omar Alfandi, Asad Masood Khattak, Syed Furqan Qadri, Iftikhar Ahmed Saeed, Salabat Khan, Bashir Hayat, Arshad Ahmad

All Works

Facial expression is a type of communication and is useful in many areas of computer vision, including intelligent visual surveillance, human-robot interaction and human behavior analysis. A deep learning approach is presented to classify happy, sad, angry, fearful, contemptuous, surprised and disgusted expressions. Accurate detection and classification of human facial expression is a critical task in image processing due to the inconsistencies amid the complexity, including change in illumination, occlusion, noise and the over-fitting problem. A stacked sparse auto-encoder for facial expression recognition (SSAE-FER) is used for unsupervised pre-training and supervised fine-tuning. SSAE-FER automatically extracts features from input images, and …

Cryptic Patent Reform Through The Inflation Reduction Act, Arti K. Rai, Rachel E. Sachs, W. Nicholson Price Ii

Faculty Scholarship

If a statute substantially changes the way patents work in an industry where patents are central, but says almost nothing about patents, is it patent reform? We argue the answer is yes — and it’s not a hypothetical question. The Inflation Reduction Act (“IRA”) does not address patents, but its drug pricing provisions are likely to prompt major changes in how patents work in the pharmaceutical industry. For many years scholars have decried industry’s ever-evolving strategies that use combinations of patents to block competition for as long as possible, widely known as “evergreening,” but legislators have not been receptive to …

Social Cognitive Processes Explain Bias In Juror Decisions, Jaime J. Castrellon, Shabnam Hakimi, Jacob M. Parelman, Lun Yin, Jonathan R. Law, Jesse A.G. Skene, David A. Ball, Artemis Malekpour, Donald H. Beskind, Neil Vidmar, John M. Pearson, J. H. Pate Skene, R. Mckell Carter

Faculty Scholarship

Jury decisions are among the most consequential social decisions in which bias plays a notable role. While courts take measures to reduce the influence of non-evidentiary factors, jurors may still incorporate biases into their decisions. One common bias, crime-type bias, is the extent to which the perceived strength of a prosecutor’s case depends on the severity of the crime. Moral judgment, affect and social cognition have been proposed as core processes underlying this and other biases. Behavioral evidence alone has been insufficient to distinguish these explanations. To identify the mechanism underlying crime-type bias, we collected functional magnetic resonance imaging patterns …