Digital Commons Network^™

Impact Of Covid Social Distancing Measures On Eating And Exercise Behaviors Among A Sample Of Hispanic Parents Of Young Children In The United States, Christian E. Vazquez, Katherine E. Hess, Megan J. Mcbride, Catherine Cubbin, Sarah Kate Bearman, Esther J. Calzada

SAGE Open Access Agreement Publications-Archive

Background: In the United States, healthy behaviors, such as eating fruits/vegetables and exercise, are well below recommended levels, particularly for Hispanics. The COVID pandemic may have exacerbated existing health behavior disparities. The current study examines the impact of COVID social distancing measures on Hispanic parents' eating and exercise behaviors, and how the impact may differ by socioeconomic status (SES) and distress levels. Design and methods: This cross-sectional logistic regression study utilized data from a sample of Hispanic parents in Texas (n = 237). COVID-related questions were collected in Summer 2020. Dependent variables included self-reported changes in exercise and eating behaviors …

Persistence Rates Of First-Year College Students Who Attend An Extended Orientation Camp Program Compared To Those Who Do Not Attend, Kristy G. O'Keefe

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Student retention is a topic of concern among higher education institutions. The dissertation pronounces a comparative quantitative research study to examine participation in summer extended orientation programs as a predictor of fall-to-spring persistence for first-year college students. This research study was conducted through a conceptual replication of a decade-old study at a regional Texas institution. In this conceptual replication study, the researcher observed the enrollment impacts, such as persistence rates and grade point average, of first-year college students who attended a summer extended orientation program compared to those of students who did not. Conducting more specific research in the area …

Quality Assurance Project Plan, 2023, Montana Bureau Of Mines And Geology

Silver Bow Creek/Butte Area Superfund Site

No abstract provided.

Evaluating Smartrock Temperature Sensor Performance In Measuring Concrete Strength, Jack Dasch

Construction Management

Concrete testing is one of the most important parts of the concrete placement process. Traditionally, this is done through the use of 6x12 cylinders cured in a lab that are broken at various stages of the curing process. These cylinders are not necessarily representative of the in-situ concrete because of their differing curing conditions- indoors versus exposed to the elements. Wireless temperature sensors, like Giatec’s SmartRock, have the potential to determine concrete strength based off the temperature of the placed concrete over time, thus eliminating the need for cylinder breaks. Once calibrated to the specific mix design, these wireless sensors …

Which Neural Network Makes More Explainable Decisions? An Approach Towards Measuring Explainability, Mengdi Zhang, Jun Sun, Jingyi Wang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Neural networks are getting increasingly popular thanks to their exceptional performance in solving many real-world problems. At the same time, they are shown to be vulnerable to attacks, difficult to debug and subject to fairness issues. To improve people’s trust in the technology, it is often necessary to provide some human-understandable explanation of neural networks’ decisions, e.g., why is that my loan application is rejected whereas hers is approved? That is, the stakeholder would be interested to minimize the chances of not being able to explain the decision consistently and would like to know how often and how easy it …

Predictive Self-Organizing Neural Networks For In-Home Detection Of Mild Cognitive Impairment, Seng Khoon Teh, Iris Rawtaer, Ah-Hwee Tan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In-home sensing of daily living patterns from older adults coupled with machine learning is a promisingapproach to detect Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI), a potentially reversible condition with early detectionand appropriate intervention. However, the number of subjects involved in such real-world studies istypically limited, posing the so-called small data problem to most predictive models which rely on a sizablenumber of labeled data. In this work, a predictive self-organizing neural network known as fuzzy AdaptiveResonance Associate Map (fuzzy ARAM) is proposed to detect MCI using in-home sensor data collected from aunique Singapore cross-sectional study. Specifically, mean and standard deviation of nine in-home …

Graph Neural Network With Self-Attention And Multi-Task Learning For Credit Default Risk Prediction, Zihao Li, Xianzhi Wang, Lina Yao, Yakun Chen, Guandong Xu, Ee-Peng Lim

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We propose a graph neural network with self-attention and multi-task learning (SaM-GNN) to leverage the advantages of deep learning for credit default risk prediction. Our approach incorporates two parallel tasks based on shared intermediate vectors for input vector reconstruction and credit default risk prediction, respectively. To better leverage supervised data, we use self-attention layers for feature representation of categorical and numeric data; we further link raw data into a graph and use a graph convolution module to aggregate similar information and cope with missing values during constructing intermediate vectors. Our method does not heavily rely on feature engineering work and …

Investigating Bloom's Cognitive Skills In Foundation And Advanced Programming Courses From Students' Discussions, Joel Jer Wei Lim, Gottipati Swapna, Kyong Jin Shim

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Programming courses provide students with the skills to develop complex business applications. Teaching and learning programming is challenging, and collaborative learning is proposed to help with this challenge. Online discussion forums promote networking with other learners such that they can build knowledge collaboratively. It aids students open their horizons of thought processes to acquire cognitive skills. Cognitive analysis of discussion is critical to understand students' learning process. In this paper, we propose Bloom's taxonomy based cognitive model for programming discussion forums. We present machine learning (ML) based solution to extract students' cognitive skills. Our evaluations on compupting courses show that …

Autopruner: Transformer-Based Call Graph Pruning, Cong Thanh Le, Hong Jin Kang, Truong Giang Nguyen, Stefanus Agus Haryono, David Lo, Xuan-Bach D. Le, Huynh Quyet Thang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Constructing a static call graph requires trade-offs between soundness and precision. Program analysis techniques for constructing call graphs are unfortunately usually imprecise. To address this problem, researchers have recently proposed call graph pruning empowered by machine learning to post-process call graphs constructed by static analysis. A machine learning model is built to capture information from the call graph by extracting structural features for use in a random forest classifier. It then removes edges that are predicted to be false positives. Despite the improvements shown by machine learning models, they are still limited as they do not consider the source code …

Efficient Navigation For Constrained Shortest Path With Adaptive Expansion Control, Wenwen Xia, Yuchen Li, Wentian Guo, Shenghong Li

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In many route planning applications, finding constrained shortest paths (CSP) is an important and fundamental problem. CSP aims to find the shortest path between two nodes on a graph while satisfying a path constraint. Solving CSPs requires a large search space and is prohibitively slow on large graphs, even with the state-of-the-art parallel solution on GPUs. The reason lies in the lack of effective navigational information and pruning strategies in the search procedure. In this paper, we propose SPEC, a Shortest Path Enhanced approach for solving the exact CSP problem. Our design rationales of SPEC rely on the observation that …

How To Formulate Specific How-To Questions In Software Development?, Mingwei Liu, Xin Peng, Andrian Marcus, Christoph Treude, Jiazhan Xie, Huanjun Xu, Yanjun Yang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Developers often ask how-to questions using search engines, technical Q&A communities, and interactive Q&A systems to seek help for specific programming tasks. However, they often do not formulate the questions in a specific way, making it hard for the systems to return the best answers. We propose an approach (TaskKG4Q) that interactively helps developers formulate a programming related how-to question. TaskKG4Q is using a programming task knowledge graph (task KG in short) mined from Stack Overflow questions, which provides a hierarchical conceptual structure for tasks in terms of [actions], [objects], and [constraints]. An empirical evaluation of the intrinsic quality of …

In War And Peace: The Impact Of World Politics On Software Ecosystems, Raula Kula, Christoph Treude

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Reliance on third-party libraries is now commonplace in contemporary software engineering. Being open source in nature, these libraries should advocate for a world where the freedoms and opportunities of open source software can be enjoyed by all. Yet, there is a growing concern related to maintainers using their influence to make political stances (i.e., referred to as protestware). In this paper, we reflect on the impact of world politics on software ecosystems, especially in the context of the ongoing War in Ukraine. We show three cases where world politics has had an impact on a software ecosystem, and how these …

Inception Transformer, Chenyang Si, Weihao Yu, Pan Zhou, Yichen Zhou, Xinchao Wang, Shuicheng Yan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Recent studies show that Transformer has strong capability of building long-range dependencies, yet is incompetent in capturing high frequencies that predominantly convey local information. To tackle this issue, we present a novel and general-purpose Inception Transformer, or iFormer for short, that effectively learns comprehensive features with both high- and low-frequency information in visual data. Specifically, we design an Inception mixer to explicitly graft the advantages of convolution and max-pooling for capturing the high-frequency information to Transformers. Different from recent hybrid frameworks, the Inception mixer brings greater efficiency through a channel splitting mechanism to adopt parallel convolution/max-pooling path and self-attention path …

Influence Of Si In Maize Plants In Kenyan Populations Of Spodoptera Frugiperda (Lepidoptera: Noctuidae), Ovide Nuambote-Yobila, Boaz Musyoka, Elijah Njuguna, Anani Yaovi Bruce, Fathia Khamis, Sevgan Subramanian, Frédéric Marion-Poll, Paul André Calatayud

All Peer-Reviewed Publications

The fall armyworm (FAW), Spodoptera frugiperda (Lepidoptera: Noctuidae), native to the Americas, was confirmed in West and Central Africa in 2016 and reported in almost all countries of sub-Saharan Africa in 2017, becoming thereafter one of the major constraints on the production of maize, the main staple food crop in the region. Cereals depend on silicon (Si)-based defences to fight off herbivores. Both FAW strains, namely rice and corn strains, have been found to be present in Kenya. The present study tested the influence of Si on larval survival and relative growth rate according to the FAW strain, using potted …

Correction: Research Strategies To Catalyze Agroecological Transitions In Low- And Middle-Income Countries (Sustainability Science, (2022), 17, 6, (2557-2577), 10.1007/S11625-022-01163-6), Sarah K. Jones, Nadia Bergamini, Francesca Beggi, Didier Lesueur, Barbara Vinceti, Arwen Bailey, Fabrice A. Declerck, Natalia Estrada-Carmona, Carlo Fadda, Etienne M. Hainzelin, Danny Hunter, Chris Kettle, Job Kihara, Abdel Kader Naino Jika, Mirjam Pulleman, Roseline Remans, Celine Termote, Tobias Fremout, Evert Thomas, Louis Verchot, Marcela Quintero

All Peer-Reviewed Publications

In the original publication of the article, under the case study “Case study 3: Participatory guarantee system to stimulate agroecological transition in Cuba”, the reference “Fernández León 2016” should read “Fernández and León 2016”. Further, the correct reference should read as below, Díaz Fernández I, León DE (2016) Gestión Empresarial y Género: Oportunidades y Retos Para Cuba. Economía y Desarrollo 157:39–49. In addition, the caption of Table 2 was incomplete in the original version of the article. The complete caption of Table 2 should read as follows “Farming approaches that seek sustainable outcomes, in contrast to conventional agriculture. This list …

Research Strategies To Catalyze Agroecological Transitions In Low- And Middle-Income Countries, Sarah K. Jones, Nadia Bergamini, Francesca Beggi, Didier Lesueur, Barbara Vinceti, Arwen Bailey, Fabrice A. Declerck, Natalia Estrada-Carmona, Carlo Fadda, Etienne M. Hainzelin, Danny Hunter, Chris Kettle, Job Kihara, Abdel Kader Naino Jika, Mirjam Pulleman, Roseline Remans, Celine Termote, Tobias Fremout, Evert Thomas, Louis Verchot, Marcela Quintero

All Peer-Reviewed Publications

Governments are updating national strategies to meet global goals on biodiversity, climate change and food systems proposed in the Convention on Biological Diversity post-2020 framework and agreed at the United Nation’s Climate Change Conference (COP26) and Food Systems Summit (UNFSS). This represents a unique and crucial opportunity to integrate and accelerate food system actions to tackle interconnected global challenges. In this context, agroecology is a game-changing approach that can provide the world’s growing population with nutritious, healthy affordable food, ensure fair incomes to farmers and halt and reverse the degradation of the natural environment. Here, we explore agroecological transition pathways …

A Decade Of Job Prospects In The Librarianship Profession, Akwasi Duffour Frimpong, Anthony Obeng Mr.

Library Philosophy and Practice (e-journal)

ABSRACT

From 2010 to 2020, the study examined job advertisements for library practitioners in Ghana. The study results reveal no substantial changes over a ten-year period. Notwithstanding, job opportunities have gradually increased. In both 2010 and 2020, Assistant Librarians had more job openings than Librarians which is the topmost position in the library profession. Higher degrees of Ph.D. and MPhil are mostly the requisite for any positions, but most jobs require a Master of Arts in Information Studies or Information Science or Bachelor of Arts in Information Science. Despite the fact that technology is permeating job openings in libraries, employers …

Buyer Beware: Avoiding Pitfalls When Buying Fine Art, Gerard Ng, Vincent Ooi

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

Our article introduces the reader to crucial concepts such as provenance, authenticity and ownership of fine art. It explains how one can check the established art databases and registers to conduct due diligence searches.We also explain the importance of a written contract for both buyers and sellers. The current common practice of transacting without a written contract can lead to considerable difficulties if issues with the artwork are discovered in the future.At the minimum, a contract should make it clear that the seller has the full responsibility for the accuracy of the provenance, particularly in cases where the artwork has …

The Curious Case Of The 0.1 Per Cent Service Charge, Vincent Ooi

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

Just before 1 August 2022, a coffeeshop zi char chain announced that it would impose a 0.1% service charge. This decision was reversed within two weeks due to "customers' reactions".While the rate might appear to be absurdly low and not worth the trouble of imposing, this article suggests that there was more to the situation than first meets the eye. GST regulations require merchants to list GST inclusive prices unless the goods and services are provided by hotels and F&B outlets that are subject to a service charge. The 0.1% rate is thus explicable as a likely attempt to get …

[Preface To] Peace, Preference, And Property: Return Migration After Violent Conflict, Sandra F. Joireman

Bookshelf

Growing numbers of people are displaced by war and violent conflict. In Ukraine, Afghanistan, Ethiopia, Myanmar, Syria, and elsewhere violence pushes civilian populations from their homes and sometimes from their countries, making them refugees. In previous decades, millions of refugees and displaced people returned to their place of origin after conflict or were resettled in countries in the Global North. Now displacements last longer, the number of people returning home is lower, and opportunities for resettlement are shrinking. More and more people spend decades in refugee camps or displaced within their own countries, raising their children away from their home …

Exploring Library Leadership Technology Decision-Making And Support Through The Use Case Of The Institutional Repository, Todd Digby

Library Philosophy and Practice (e-journal)

Academic and research libraries are dependent on a wide range of technology and systems to manage access and storage of digital research materials and collections. Given the high level of costs and staff needed to support these systems, the factors that influence library leadership in their decision-making process to support or adopt new technologies is important.

To understand the dynamics involved with this decision-making process, this study specifically examined influencing factors that academic library leaders use in their decisions to support or adopt institutional repository (IR) systems. A mixed method research study using a quantitative research survey instrument, adapted from …

Impact And Challenges Of Open Learning On Library And Information Science Community With Special Reference To Moocs, Fazia Azhar, Babita Jaiswal

Library Philosophy and Practice (e-journal)

With the occurrence of the internet and new technologies, particularly the role of the World Wide Web (WWW) and along with many added forms of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs), the process of learning kept on altering their structure, modes, and shapes dynamically. This has ensued with the emergence of online learning. There are numerous online learning platforms such as online courses, online education systems, various modes of distance e-learning, and so on accessible to the users. Nowadays, in the arena of online learning environment, a new concept of MOOC has been penetrated as a prevalent medium of learning. The …

Evolution Of Immune Function In Response To Dietary Macronutrients In Male And Female Decorated Crickets, Corinne Letendre, Alejandro Rios-Villamil, Alexandria Williams, James Rapkin, Scott K. Sakaluk, Clarissa M. House, John Hunt

Faculty Publications – Biological Sciences

Although dietary macronutrients are known to regulate insect immunity, few studies have examined their evolutionary effects. Here, we evaluate this relationship in the cricket Gryllodes sigillatus by maintaining replicate populations on four diets differing in protein (P) to carbohydrate (C) ratio (P‐ or C‐biased) and nutritional content (low‐ or high‐nutrition) for >37 generations. We split each population into two; one maintained on their evolution diet and the other switched to their ancestral diet. We also maintained populations exclusively on the ancestral diet (baseline). After three generations, we measured three immune parameters in males and females from each population. Immunity was …

Privacy Qui Tam, Peter Ormerod

Faculty Publications

Privacy law keeps getting stronger, but surveillance-based businesses have proven immune to these new legal regimes. The disconnect between privacy law in theory and in practice is a multifaceted problem, and one critical component is enforcement.

Today, most privacy laws are enforced by governmental regulators—the Federal Trade Commission, the nascent California Privacy Protection Agency, and state attorneys general. An enduring impasse for proposed privacy laws is whether to supplement public enforcement by using a private right of action to authorize individuals to enforce the law.

Both of these conventional enforcement schemes have significant shortcomings. Public enforcement has proven inadequate because …

Commentary: Examining Contextual Factors Contributing To Differentials In Covid-19 Mortality In U.S. Vs. India., Preeti Zanwar, Katrine L Wallace, Christopher Soria, Arokiasamy Perianayagam

College of Population Health Faculty Papers

No abstract provided.

Profit-Maximizing Potassium Fertilizer Recommendations For Corn And Cotton, Kimberly B. Oliver, Michael P. Popp, Nathan A. Slaton, Gerson L. Drescher, Trenton L. Roberts

Crop, Soil and Environmental Sciences Faculty Publications and Presentations

Whereas K fertilization is necessary to maximize corn (Zea mays L.) and cotton (Gossypium hirsutum L.) yields in soils with sub-optimum K availability, maximizing yield is rarely profit-maximizing. Estimating the tradeoff between yield and fertilizer cost using current soil-building and/or yield-maximizing rate recommendations vs. profit-maximizing fertilizer-K rates (KR^*) provides insights for producers. Thirty-nine and 24 fertilizer-K rate trials were used to estimate respective corn and cotton yield response based on soil-K availability (SK). Using a field's SK, yield potential, yield response to fertilizer-K, crop price, and fertilizer-K cost, KR^* were calculated over the past 10 …

This Is Public Health?, Donna L. Williams

Journal of the Louisiana Public Health Association

No abstract provided.

A Survey On Behaviors Related To Use Of Vapor- Emitting Devices And Oral Nicotinepouches Among Students Enrolled In Freshman Seminar At Lsu Shreveport (Lsus), Matthew A. Kelley, Marshae A. Mcneal, Timothy P. Winter

Journal of the Louisiana Public Health Association

No abstract provided.

Vol 3 November '22 Full Issue, Donna L. Williams

Journal of the Louisiana Public Health Association

No abstract provided.

Impact Of The Patient Protection And Affordable Care Act Medicaid Expansion On Cancer Screening Uptake In Louisiana, Bilikisu Elewonibi, Coralia Vazquez-Otero, Adaobi Ankwe, Rhonda Belue

Journal of the Louisiana Public Health Association

Background: Louisiana is the only southern state that opted to receive federal funding to expand Medicaid eligibility to include adults with low incomes. This study explored the effect of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA) on cancer screening in Louisiana and examined any differences in screening uptake by race and sex after expansion. Methods: Data from the 2014, 2016, 2018, and 2020 Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System for Louisiana were used. The percentage of participants (N=10,076) each year who reported receiving a screening test was plotted on a graph to examine the trend over time. Results: Colorectal cancer …