Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Impact Of Declining Proposal Success Rates On Scientific Productivity, Ted Von Hippel, Priscilla Cushman, Todd Hoeksema, Chryssa Kouveliotou, James Lowenthal, Bradley Peterson, Keivan G. Stassun,

Ted von Hippel

Over the last decade proposal success rates in the fundamental sciences have dropped significantly. Astronomy and related fields funded by NASA and NSF are no exception. Data across agencies show that this is not principally the result of a decline in proposal merit (the proportion of proposals receiving high rankings is largely unchanged), nor of a shift in proposer demographics (seniority, gender, and institutional affiliation have all remained unchanged), nor of an increase (beyond inflation) in the average requested funding per proposal, nor of an increase in the number of proposals per investigator in any one year. Rather, the statistics …

Interpreting Main Effect With Moderation ‐‐ A View Through The Prism Of Causal Dissection, Xinshu Zhao

Professor Xinshu ZHAO

Irresistible Bargains: Navigating The Surveillance Society, Robert M. Pallitto

Robert M Pallitto

Four Functions Of Statistical Significance Tests, Xinshu Zhao

Professor Xinshu ZHAO

Characterizing The Performance And Behaviors Of Runners Using Twitter, Qian He, Emmanuel Agu, Diane Strong, Bengisu Tulu, Peder Pedersen

Emmanuel O. Agu

Running is a popular physical activity that improves physical and mental wellbeing. Unfortunately, up-to- date information about runners’ performance and psychological wellbeing is limited. Many questions remain unanswered, such as how far and how fast runners typically run, their preferred running times and frequencies, how long new runners persist before dropping out, and what factors cause runners to quit. Without hard data, establishing patterns of runner behavior and mitigating the challenges they face are difficult. Collecting data manually from large numbers of runners for research studies is costly and time consuming. Emerging Social Networking Services (SNS) and fitness tracking devices …

A Context-Aware Activity Recommendation Smartphone Application To Mitigate Sedentary Lifestyles, Qian He, Emmanuel Agu

Emmanuel O. Agu

A sedentary lifestyle involves irregular or no physical activity. In this kind of lifestyle, people’s activities do not increase their energy expenditure substantially above resting levels. Long periods of sitting, lying, watching television, playing video games, and using the computer are typical examples. Energy expenditures at 1.0-1.5 Metabolic Equivalent Units (METs) are considered sedentary behaviors. A recent study of sedentary lifestyles found that the length of sedentary times is associated with an increased risk of diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and cardiovascular and all-cause mortality. In this study, we developed a smartphone application called “On11”, which continuously tracks and informs the user …

Augmenting Distance Education Skills Development In Paramedic Science Through Mixed Media Visualisation, Michael Cowling, Emma Moore, James Birt

James Birt

Extract: This paper presents a learning intervention using mixed media visualisation (3D printing and Augmented Reality simulation) to enhance skills development for paramedic science students studying through distance education. Presented is a research methodology to evaluate the effectiveness of the mixed media visualisation techniques to provide more hands-on skill practice to paramedic science students studying the course at a distance. The context for this study is the skills acquisition and retention, focusing on Laryngoscopy with foreign body removal.

Session C-1: Coolhub.Imsa: Collaborative Innovation Networks, James Gerry, Carl Heine, Branson Lawrence, Aracelys Rios

Carl Heine

The use of social networking for students to learn from each other and experts around the world

Session D-4: Coolhub.Imsa: Collaborative Innovation In Action, Carl Heine, James Gerry

Carl Heine

Transform STEM teaching and learning with CoolHub.IMSA, a free virtual platform where youth and adults collaborate on projects they create. Explore the site through the eyes of project members and discover powerful ways to collaborate, innovate and network for learning.

Microblogging For Engaged Teaching And Learning, Thomas Menkhoff, Kok Siew Benjamin Gan, Charles Jason Woodard, Yue Wah Chay

C. Jason Woodard

In this paper, we report how we put a newly developed Twitter application to work in the context of a Knowledge Management course taught at the Singapore Management University (SMU) allowing students to post and view relevant tweets in an organized manner for the benefit of collaborative class discussions and learning. Innovative elements of the ongoing project include the explorative usage of social media such as Twitter in the higher education context, student participation in providing initial evidence and qualitative feedback that tweeting is pedagogically meaningful and a newly built-in feature which can resolve tweeting challenges which occurred in class …

Predicting Best Answerers For New Questions: An Approach Leveraging Topic Modeling And Collaborative Voting, Yuan Tian, Pavneet Singh Kochhar, Ee Peng Lim, Feida Zhu, David Lo

David LO

Community Question Answering (CQA) sites are becoming increasingly important source of information where users can share knowledge on various topics. Although these platforms bring new opportunities for users to seek help or provide solutions, they also pose many challenges with the ever growing size of the community. The sheer number of questions posted everyday motivates the problem of routing questions to the appropriate users who can answer them. In this paper, we propose an approach to predict the best answerer for a new question on CQA site. Our approach considers both user interest and user expertise relevant to the topics …

Social Sensing For Urban Crisis Management: The Case Of Singapore Haze, Philips Kokoh Prasetyo, Ming Gao, Ee Peng Lim, Christie N. Scollon

Ming Gao

Sensing social media for trends and events has become possible as increasing number of users rely on social media to share information. In the event of a major disaster or social event, one can therefore study the event quickly by gathering and analyzing social media data. One can also design appropriate responses such as allocating resources to the affected areas, sharing event related information, and managing public anxiety. Past research on social event studies using social media often focused on one type of data analysis (e.g., hashtag clusters, diffusion of events, influential users, etc.) on a single social media data …

The Politics Media Equation:Exposing Two Faces Of Old Nexus Through Study Of General Elections,Wikileaks And Radia Tapes, Ratnesh Dwivedi Mr

Ratnesh Dwivedi

The important identity of a responsible media is playing an unbiased role in reporting a matter without giving unnecessary hype to attract the attention of the gullible public with the object of making money and money only.After reporting properly the media can educate the public to form their own opinion in the matters of public interest. Throughout the centuries, the world has never existed without information and communication, hence the inexhaustible essence of mass media. The government has the power to either make or reject whatever that will exist within its environment. It also determines how free the mass media …

Port Fairy Flood Warning Assessment Project (Report), Neil Dufty

Neil Dufty

The assessment examined the following components of the Total Flood Warning System (TFWS) guided by the Australian Government’s Manual 21 – Flood Warning: 1. Understanding of flood risks and hazards 2. Emergency management planning 3. Community flood education 4. Data collection 5. Flood prediction and interpretation 6. Message construction 7. Message communication 8. Response 9. Review of the TFWS 10. Community and stakeholder consultation 11. Integration of the TFWS components. The assessment estimated that a TFWS at Port Fairy would provide reduction in damages of $400,274 over a 20 year life cycle. Moreover, it would improve public safety by markedly …

Russells Creek Total Flood Warning Scoping Study Project (Report), Neil Dufty

Neil Dufty

The assessment examined the components of the Total Flood Warning System (TFWS) based on the Australian Government’s Manual 21 – Flood Warning. The TFWS components examined were: 1. Understanding of flood risks and hazards 2. Emergency management planning 3. Community flood education 4. Data collection 5. Flood prediction and interpretation 6. Message construction 7. Message communication 8. Response 9. Review of the TFWS 10. Community and stakeholder consultation The assessment found that due to a very short warning time of up to one hour it is not possible to build a TFWS across all of the above components. The best …

The Place Of Education In Building Disaster Resilience: A Strategic Examination, Neil Dufty

Neil Dufty

No abstract provided.

A Study Of Mexican Free-Tailed Bat Chirp Syllables: Bayesian Functional Mixed Modeling Of Nonstationary Time Series Data With Time-Dependent Spectra, Josue G. Martinez, Kirsten M. Bohn, Raymond J. Carroll, Jeffrey S. Morris

Jeffrey S. Morris

We describe a new approach to analyze chirp syllables of free-tailed bats from two regions of Texas in which they are predominant: Austin and College Station. Our goal is to characterize any systematic regional differences in the mating chirps and assess whether individual bats have signature chirps. The data are analyzed by modeling spectrograms of the chirps as responses in a Bayesian functional mixed model. Given the variable chirp lengths, we compute the spectrograms on a relative time scale interpretable as the relative chirp position, using a variable window overlap based on chirp length. We use 2D wavelet transforms to …

The Importance Of Connected Communities To Flood Resilience, Neil Dufty

Neil Dufty

No abstract provided.

Reviewing Total Flood Warning Systems, Neil Dufty, Steven Molino

Neil Dufty

No abstract provided.

Cultural Discourse Of Dwelling: Environmental Comunication As A Place-Based Practice, Donal Carbaugh

Donal Carbaugh

In this essay we contribute a response to intellectual and practical problems by using and developing a perspective on environmental communication that is reflexively grounded in place and that explores human relations with nature, while embracing cultural and linguistic variability in these processes. Our goals are to introduce a way to think through communication to places, and further to link that understanding to issues of engaged environmental action, to deeply seated notions of identity, and to the affective dimension of belonging that place-based communication often brings with it. Our way of doing this is to theorize and study cultural discourses …

Observatory Of Trends In Software Related Microblogs, Achananuparp Palakorn, Nelman Lubis Ibrahim, Yuan Tian, David Lo, Ee Peng Lim

David LO

Microblogging has recently become a popular means to disseminate information among millions of people. Interestingly, software developers also use microblog to communicate with one another. Different from traditional media, microblog users tend to focus on recency and informality of content. Many tweet contents are relatively more personal and Opinionated, compared to that of traditional news report. Thus, by analyzing microblogs, one could get the up-to-date information about what people are interested in or feel toward a particular topic. In this paper, we describe our microblog observatory that aggregates more than 70,000 Twitter feeds, captures software-related tweets, and computes trends from …

Automatic Classification Of Software Related Microblogs, Philips Kokoh Prasetyo, David Lo, Achananuparp Palakorn, Yuan Tian, Ee Peng Lim

David LO

Millions of people, including those in the software engineering communities have turned to microblogging services, such as Twitter, as a means to quickly disseminate information. A number of past studies by Treude et al., Storey, and Yuan et al. have shown that a wealth of interesting information is stored in these microblogs. However, microblogs also contain a large amount of noisy content that are less relevant to software developers in engineering software systems. In this work, we perform a preliminary study to investigate the feasibility of automatic classification of microblogs into two categories: relevant and irrelevant to engineering software systems. …

Towards A Resilient Sydney: Research Into The Role Of Emergency Management In Climate Change Adaptation (Research Summary), Neil Dufty, Tim Morrison

Neil Dufty

No abstract provided.

Community Flood Education And Awareness In Fairfield City (Report), Neil Dufty

Neil Dufty

No abstract provided.

Sea No Evil, Hear No Evil - Community Engagement On Adaptation To Sea Level Change, Neil Dufty, Heather Stevens, Stuart Waters, Greg Giles

Neil Dufty

No abstract provided.

Report Of The 2012 North East Flood Review (Report), Neil Dufty

Neil Dufty

No abstract provided.

Uprising: The Internet's Unintended Consequences, Marcus Breen

Marcus Breen

The Internet has transformed the social relations that were once managed by the powers that be. As a rapidly maturing communications technology, the Internet has brought people together even while it has reinforced privatism. The desktop computer, the laptop, the cellular and mobile phone, the Global Positoning System, the pilotless drone aircraft, video games and government documents courtesy of Wikileaks, all are connected on the network of networks. Together these converged elements of a global socio-technical system offer wonderful possibilities for human emancipation, even while those ideas collide with established ideas of civility and decency. Utilizing a transdisciplinary approach, Uprising …

What Does Software Engineering Community Microblog About?, Yuan Tian, Palakorn Achananuparp, Ibrahim Nelman Lubis, David Lo, Ee Peng Lim

David LO

Microblogging is a new trend to communicate and to disseminate information. One microblog post could potentially reach millions of users. Millions of microblogs are generated on a daily basis on popular sites such as Twitter. The popularity of microblogging among programmers, software engineers, and software users has also led to their use of microblogs to communicate software engineering issues apart from using emails and other traditional communication channels.Understanding how millions of users use microblogs in software engineering related activities would shed light on ways we could leverage the fast evolving microblogging content to aid software development efforts. In this work, …

Work In Progress - Synthesizing Design, Engineering, And Entrepreneurship Through A Mobile Application Development Course, Mark L. Chang

Mark L. Chang

In this paper, we describe our experiences in designing and delivering a course that blends together design, engineering, and entrepreneurship through the use of mobile devices. The significance of this work is in advocating for and demonstrating the motivational and educational benefits of using a mobile platform, and describing how to utilize the mobile marketplace to provide an authentic, real-world experience across these three domains.

Emp And Geomagnetic Storm Protection Of Critical Infrastructure, George H. Baker Iii

George H Baker

EMP and solar storm wide geographic coverage and ubiquitous system effects beg the question of “Where to begin?” with protection efforts. Thus, in addressing these “wide area electromagnetic (EM) effects,” we must be clever in deciding where to invest limited resources. Based on simple risk analysis, the electric power and communication infrastructures emerge as the highest priority for EM protection. Programs focused on these highest risk infrastructures will go a long way in lessoning societal impact. Given the national scope of the effects, such programs must be coordinated at the national level but implemented at local level. Because wide-area EM …