Digital Commons Network^™

Cpu Cooling Pulse Device For Enhanced Heat Transfer, Hannah Farabee, Noémie L. Iñiguez, Hugo Nunez, Wendy Zwanka

Senior Theses

Ice Dragon Cooling is a company which researches thermofluids and heat transfer technologies. The company’s present research focuses on HVAC and computer applications, with an emphasis on nanofluid development. To support Ice Dragon’s mission, the company wants a product that enhances heat transfer efficiency in liquid-cooled CPU systems. The product is to be a pulse device which increases the turbulence of a liquid across a computer CPU cooling block, thereby expediting heat transfer away from the CPU.

The needs for Ice Dragon Cooling were determined based on engineering knowledge and industry consultation. After further analysis, it was determined that increasing …

Bring In The Culture To The Science Classroom ; Bring In The Science Classroom To The Culture, Ying-Chen Lin

Senior Theses

Middle school science has a stigma of being a boring subject area from the student’s perspectives due to the spoon-fed characteristics and the lack of real-world connections in the curriculum design. The low-level student engagement and motivation in the science classroom often contribute to students’ low academic achievement, especially those who have been underserved in the educational system. In addition, with a view to addressing the increasing diversity in the classroom, teachers are encouraged to practice culturally relevant pedagogy (CRP) in the lessons so they can reach every student and make the class learning experience more meaningful and relevant to …

The Effects Of Student Identities On Stressors And College Satisfaction, Isabella Heimke

Senior Theses

Undergraduate college students are faced with numerous stressors in their day to day life, many of which are affected by their individual identities. Research shows college is a time when students explore different facets of their identity, which can influence a student’s school performance and overall well-being. The main research of this study asks: How do various identities of University of South Carolina undergraduate students—such as race, gender, and sexual orientation—affect stressors and college satisfaction? This study was a secondary data analysis of the 2016 Campus Climate Undergraduate Survey, administered to all University of South Carolina undergraduates. Each respondent was …

The Claude Henry Neuffer Diaries: The Story Of A Signal Corps Serviceman In The China-Burma-India Theater Of Wwii, Kyle Brady Henderson

Senior Theses

This senior thesis project involved working with an unprocessed collection from the Manuscripts Collection of the South Caroliniana Library. The collection (which mainly consists of two diary volumes) documents Claude Henry Neuffer’s service in the China-Burma-India Theater during World War II. The goal of this thesis was to aid in the processing and digitization of this collection through the creation of full transcripts, a map, and a narrative description of the collection. This work will help to preserve the collection, improve accessibility to future researchers, and provide additional historical context.

An Investigation Into The Relationship Between Academic Pressure And Non-Medical Prescription Stimulant Use Among University Of South Carolina Undergraduate Students, Arslan Valimohamed

Senior Theses

One hundred and six undergraduate students of the University of South Carolina were surveyed to understand misuse of prescription stimulants and how perceived academic pressure may play a role in this behavior. Overall, the survey revealed that 33.0% of participants reported illicit use of prescription stimulants in the last 30 days, and 52.8% reported illicitly using prescription stimulants at least once during their time in college. Data from the survey responses indicated that students perceiving academic pressure were more likely to have misused prescription stimulants at least once during their time in college, but only if these students also reported …

Public Education Reform In South Carolina: An Analysis Of Legislative Efforts In 2019, Francis Halloran

Senior Theses

This thesis is a legislative research project on the South Carolina Education, Career Opportunity, and Access for All Act, proposed by the South Carolina General Assembly on January 24, 2019. I begin by exploring the history of the modern public education reform movement in South Carolina, reviewing related legislation over the last half-century, and focusing on the cornerstone South Carolina Supreme Court case Abbeville County School District v. The State of South Carolina. Next, the South Carolina Education, Career Opportunity, and Access for All Act provides the basis for a comprehensive summary of all statutory reforms attempted by this …

The Southern American Belle: History, Evolution, And Perceptions In Contemporary Culture, Hannah B. Vickery

Senior Theses

This research study seeks to examine the concept of the southern belle and to provide greater insight into how the southern belle is perceived by those today as a means of describing contemporary southern womanhood and culture. Chapter 1 traces the history of the southern belle from its pre-Civil War roots, through the turmoil of the Civil War, and up through post-war Reconstruction and beyond, thereby situating the concept of the southern belle within the context of southern history. Utilizing a socio-linguistic approach, Chapter 2 explains the research methodology of this study where two group interviews were conducted and where …

Sonification Of Epigenetic Processes, Joelle Strom

Senior Theses

Sonification is the process of creating sound or music from data for investigative or aesthetic purposes. Data sonification has been used in multiple fields to provide an additional layer of analysis to datasets, engage general audiences in a scientific topic, or create an evocative musical piece. Sonification has been extended to biological subjects, including macromolecules such as protein and DNA. Epigenetics, the processes by which gene expression is regulated, is a burgeoning field of molecular biology research. Epigenetic processes have been scarcely sonified, and the process of sonifying DNA base methylation has never been published. DNA methylation is an integral …

Hardball Vs. Beanball: Identifying Fundamentally Antidemocratic Tactics, Jed Handelsman Shugerman

Faculty Scholarship

The “constitutional hardball” metaphor used by legal scholars and political scientists illuminates an important phenomenon in American politics, but it obscures a crisis in American democracy. In baseball, hardball encompasses legitimate tactics: pitching inside to brush a batter back but not injure, hard slides, hard tags. Baseball fans celebrate hardball. Many of the constitutional hardball maneuvers previously identified by scholars have been legitimate, if aggressive, constitutional political moves. But the label “hardball” has been interpreted too broadly to include illegitimate, fundamentally undemocratic tactics. I suggest a different baseball metaphor for such tactics: beanball, pitches meant to injure and knock out …

Professionals, Politicos, And Crony Attorneys General: A Historical Sketch Of The U.S. Attorney General As A Case For Structural Independence, Jed Handelsman Shugerman

Faculty Scholarship

We assume that the nineteenth century was an era of patronage, and the twentieth century marked the rise of professionalization. But the Office of the Attorney General reveals an opposite pattern — a troubling rise of cronyism in the DOJ from the early twentieth century.

This Article uses the rough categories of “professional,” “politico,” and “insider” or “crony,” based on each attorney general's background and how he or she rose to the office (rather than based upon their performance in the office.) Most AGs in the nineteenth century were "politicos" (major established political figures) or "professionals" (experienced lawyers relatively separate …

Shareholder Activism And Stakeholder Engagement Strategies: Promoting Environmental Justice, Human Rights, And Sustainable Development Goals, Erika George

Faculty Scholarship

The United Nations 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development is an ambitious "plan of action for people, planet and prosperity" which seeks to promote peace and eradicate poverty. The Agenda's goals cannot be reached without private sector participation and changes to certain business practices that contribute to adverse environmental and human rights impacts. When natural resources are managed responsibly the resulting economic development can help to eradicate poverty. However, when natural resources are managed poorly, certain extractives industry sector practices can generate or exacerbate human rights abuses, environmental degradation, corruption, and conflict. Fossil fuels are connected to the changing climate. The …

Maximum Iv Tpa Dose For Obese Patients Is Associated With Greater Likelihood Of Hemorrhagic Conversion And Worse Functional Outcome At Discharge, Amy Starosciak, Felipe De Los Rios La Rosa

All Publications

No abstract provided.

Tax Reform, Mixed‐Entity Markets, And Hospitals: How The 2017 Tax Cuts And Jobs Act Favors The For‐Profit Hospital Model, Elizabeth King

Faculty Scholarship

When the U.S. Congress passed the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act in 2017 (the “TCJA”), it achieved a significant tax cut for corporations. In doing so, however, Congress simultaneously reshaped the landscape for mixed‐entity markets—that is, industries like healthcare and education in which nonprofit, for‐profit, and government entities coexist and compete. This is particularly true for the hospital market in which the TCJA’s provisions have subtly but decidedly tilted market conditions towards a for‐profit hospital model.

While scholars may debate the benefits of a nonprofit versus a for‐ profit entity model, the reality is that the majority of U.S. hospitals, …

Purification Of Ara6, Ara7, And Hopaa1-1 For Enzymatic Activity Study, Alexandra M. Koberlein

Senior Theses

This thesis project details the purification of proteins HopAA1-1, ARA6, and ARA7 for enzymatic analysis via the use of a phosphate detection assay. The results of the purification process and phosphate assay suggest that HopAA1-1 is a novel GAP protein found in plant models that may exhibit GAP activity on RAB GTPase protein ARA6.

Fair And Dynamic Data Sharing Framework In Cloud-Assisted Internet Of Everything, Yinbin Miao, Ximeng Liu, Kim-Kwang Raymond Choo, Robert H. Deng, Hongjun Wu, Hongwei Li

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Cloud-assisted Internet of Things (IoT) is increasingly prevalent in our society, for example in home and office environment; hence, it is also known as cloud-assisted Internet of Everything (IoE). While in such a setup, data can be easily shared and disseminated (e.g., between a device, such as Amazon Echo and the cloud, such as Amazon AWS), there are potential security considerations that need to be addressed. Thus, a number of security solutions have been proposed. For example, searchable encryption (SE) has been extensively studied due to its capability to facilitate searching of encrypted data. However, threat models in most existing …

Dependable Machine Intelligence At The Tactical Edge, Archan Misra, Kasthuri Jayarajah, Dulanga Kaveesha Weerakoon Weerakoon Mudiyanselage, Randy Tandriansyah Daratan, Shuochao Yao, Tarek Abdelzaher

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The paper describes a vision for dependable application of machine learning-based inferencing on resource-constrained edge devices. The high computational overhead of sophisticated deep learning learning techniques imposes a prohibitive overhead, both in terms of energy consumption and sustainable processing throughput, on such resource-constrained edge devices (e.g., audio or video sensors). To overcome these limitations, we propose a ``cognitive edge" paradigm, whereby (a) an edge device first autonomously uses statistical analysis to identify potential collaborative IoT nodes, and (b) the IoT nodes then perform real-time sharing of various intermediate state to improve their individual execution of machine intelligence tasks. We provide …

Cinema: Efficient And Privacy-Preserving Online Medical Primary Diagnosis With Skyline Query, Jianfeng Hua, Hui Zhu, Fengwei Wang, Ximeng Liu, Rongxing Lu, Hao Li, Yeping Zhang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Online medical primary diagnosis system, which can provide convenient medical decision support through applying mobile communication and data analysis technology, has been considered as a promising approach to improve the quality of healthcare service. However, it still faces many severe challenges on the privacy of users' health information and the accuracy of diagnosis result, which deter the wide adoption of online medical primary diagnosis system. In this paper, we propose an efficient and privacy-preserving online medical primary diagnosis (CINEMA) framework. Within CINEMA framework, users can access online medical primary diagnosing service accurately without divulging their medical data. Specifically, based on …

Perception Coordination Network: A Neuro Framework For Multimodal Concept Acquisition And Binding, You-Lu Xing, Xiao-Feng Shi, Fu-Rao Shen, Jin-Xi Zhao, Jing-Xin Pan, Ah-Hwee Tan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

To simulate the concept acquisition and binding of different senses in the brain, a biologically inspired neural network model named perception coordination network (PCN) is proposed. It is a hierarchical structure, which is functionally divided into the primary sensory area (PSA), the primary sensory association area (SAA), and the higher order association area (HAA). The PSA contains feature neurons which respond to many elementary features, e.g., colors, shapes, syllables, and basic flavors. The SAA contains primary concept neurons which combine the elementary features in the PSA to represent unimodal concept of objects, e.g., the image of an apple, the Chinese …

The Capacitated Team Orienteering Problem, Aldy Gunawan, Kien Ming Ng, Vincent F. Yu, Gordy Adiprasetyo, Hoong Chuin Lau

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This paper focuses on a recent variant of the Orienteering Problem (OP), namely the Capacitated Team OP (CTOP) which arises in the logistics industry. In this problem, each node is associated with a demand that needs to be satisfied and a score that need to be collected. Given a set of homogeneous fleet of vehicles, the objective is to find a path for each vehicle in order to maximize the total collected score, without violating the capacity and time budget. We propose an Iterated Local Search (ILS) algorithm for solving the CTOP. Two strategies, either accepting a new solution as …

Deepreview: Automatic Code Review Using Deep Multi-Instance Learning, Hengyi Li, Shuting Shi, Ferdian Thung, Xuan Huo, Bowen Xu, Ming Li, David Lo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Code review, an inspection of code changes in order to identify and fix defects before integration, is essential in Software Quality Assurance (SQA). Code review is a time-consuming task since the reviewers need to understand, analysis and provide comments manually. To alleviate the burden of reviewers, automatic code review is needed. However, this task has not been well studied before. To bridge this research gap, in this paper, we formalize automatic code review as a multi-instance learning task that each change consisting of multiple hunks is regarded as a bag, and each hunk is described as an instance. We propose …

Dynamic Student Classification On Memory Networks For Knowledge Tracing, Sein Minn, Michel C. Desmarais, Feida Zhu, Jing Xiao, Jianzong Wang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Knowledge Tracing (KT) is the assessment of student’s knowledge state and predicting whether that student may or may not answer the next problem correctly based on a number of previous practices and outcomes in their learning process. KT leverages machine learning and data mining techniques to provide better assessment, supportive learning feedback and adaptive instructions. In this paper, we propose a novel model called Dynamic Student Classification on Memory Networks (DSCMN) for knowledge tracing that enhances existing KT approaches by capturing temporal learning ability at each time interval in student’s long-term learning process. Experimental results confirm that the proposed model …

Route Planning For A Fleet Of Electric Vehicles With Waiting Times At Charging Stations, Baoxiang Li, Shashi Shekhar Jha, Hoong Chuin Lau

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Electric Vehicles (EVs) are the next wave of technology in the transportation industry. EVs are increasingly becoming common for personal transport and pushing the boundaries to become the mainstream mode of transportation. Use of such EVs in logistic fleets for delivering customer goods is not far from becoming reality. However, managing such fleet of EVs bring new challenges in terms of battery capacities and charging infrastructure for efficient route planning. Researchers have addressed such issues considering different aspects of the EVs such as linear battery charging/discharging rate, fixed travel times, etc. In this paper, we address the issue of waiting …

Text Analytics Approach To Examining Corporate Social Responsibility, Nurul Asyikeen Binte Azhar, Gary Pan, Poh Sun Seow, Andrew Koh, Wan Ying Tay

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This research article explores a text analyticsapproach to assess the prominence of corporate social responsibility in 554Singapore-listed firms through a content analysis of the news. Instead ofrelying on publications by the firms, third-party news coverage is used toreduce potential biases due to over-reporting. A dataset of news articles onthe included firms published during fiscal years 2015 and 2016 is crawled, andthe articles’ content is parsed to search for information related to corporatesocial responsibility. Graph theory is subsequently used to create acollaborative network of listed firms’ corporate social responsibilityactivities. The results highlight a more automated and scalable means ofassessing the prominence …

Efficient Algorithms For Solving Aggregate Keyword Routing Problems, Qize Jiang, Weiwei Sun, Baihua Zheng, Kunjie Chen

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

With the emergence of smart phones and the popularity of GPS, the number of point of interest (POIs) is growing rapidly and spatial keyword search based on POIs has attracted significant attention. In this paper, we study a more sophistic type of spatial keyword searches that considers multiple query points and multiple query keywords, namely Aggregate Keyword Routing (AKR). AKR looks for an aggregate point m together with routes from each query point to m. The aggregate point has to satisfy the aggregate keywords, the routes from query points to the aggregate point have to pass POIs in order to …

Maximizing Multifaceted Network Influence, Yuchen Li, Ju Fan, George V. Ovchinnikov, Panagiotis Karras

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

An information dissemination campaign is often multifaceted, involving several facets or pieces of information disseminating from different sources. The question then arises, how should we assign such pieces to eligible sources so as to achieve the best viral dissemination results? Past research has studied the problem of Influence Maximization (IM), which is to select a set of k promoters that maximizes the expected reach of a message over a network. However, in this classical IM problem, each promoter spreads out the same unitary piece of information. In this paper, we propose the Optimal Influential Pieces Assignment (OIPA) problem, which is …

Online Collaborative Filtering With Implicit Feedback, Jianwen Yin, Chenghao Liu, Jundong Li, Bing Tian Dai, Yun-Chen Chen, Min Wu, Jianling Sun

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Studying recommender systems with implicit feedback has become increasingly important. However, most existing works are designed in an offline setting while online recommendation is quite challenging due to the one-class nature of implicit feedback. In this paper, we propose an online collaborative filtering method for implicit feedback. We highlight three critical issues of existing works. First, when positive feedback arrives sequentially, if we treat all the other missing items for this given user as the negative samples, the mis-classified items will incur a large deviation since some items might appear as the positive feedback in the subsequent rounds. Second, the …

Beyond The Employment Dichotomy: An Examination Of Recidivism And Days Remaining In The Community By Post-Release Employment Status, Amanda Marie Bunting, Michele Staton, Erin Winston, Kevin Pangburn

Behavioral Science Faculty Publications

Criminological research has tended to consider employment in a dichotomy of employed versus unemployed. The current research examines a sample of individuals 1-year post-release to assess the extent to which four distinct employment categories (full-time, part-time, disabled, and unemployed) are associated with reincarceration and days remaining in the community. Findings indicate disabled individuals remain in the community longer and at a higher proportion compared with other employment categories. Furthermore, unique protective and risk factors are found to be associated with each employment category while some risk factors (e.g., homelessness) highlight the importance of addressing reentry barriers regardless as to employment …

East Asian Low Marriage And Birth Rates: The Role Of Life History Strategy, Culture, And Social Status Affordance, Jose Yong, Norman P. Li, Peter K. Jonason, Yi Wen Tan

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Although economic development is broadly associated with low fertility, countries with a predominantly East Asian cultural population exhibit the lowest fertility rates in the developed world. This study (N = 243) examined social status affordance (SSA) as a novel factor underlying cultural variations in marriage and childbearing attitudes. Drawing from a life history perspective, we argue that SSA reflects the availability and ease of attaining social status from the environment, which then influences people's reproductive motivations. We found that strong competition for prestigious jobs in developed East Asian countries, which is hypothesized to be an outcome of their collectivistic nature …

Restructured Frame-Of-Reference Training Improves Rating Accuracy, Ming-Hong Tsai, Serena Wee, Brandon Koh

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

The use of heuristic judgments is prevalent in organizations and negatively impacts accurate employee assessments. To minimize the negative impact of heuristic judgments (i.e., anchoring and adjustment), we aim to improve rating accuracy by restructuring frame‐of‐reference (FOR) training. We conducted five studies (N = 1,143) using different samples (three including participants with hiring experience), training environments (onsite and online), and rating contexts (evaluations of sales representatives, teachers, contract negotiation specialists, and retail store managers). Across the five studies, the average improvement in rating accuracy was at least twice as large for restructured FOR (vs. control) training as it was for …

Why Smart Leaders Fail, David Chan

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

In an invited commentary, SMU Behavioural Sciences Institute Director Professor David Chan discussed leadership issues in the Singapore context. He explained how the selection and development of leaders need to go beyond academic abilities to focus on non-academic attributes, especially the ability to make effective judgements in practical situations.