Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Using Redundant Primer Sets To Detect Multiple Native Alaskan Fish Species From Environmental Dna, Damian Menning, Trey Simmons, Sandra Talbot

United States National Park Service: Publications

Accurate and timely data regarding freshwater fish communities is important for informed decision-making by local, state, tribal, and federal land and resource managers; however, conducting traditional gear-based fish surveys can be an expensive and time-consuming process, particularly in remote areas, like those that characterize much of Alaska. To help address this challenge, we developed and tested five multi-species environmental DNA (eDNA) primer sets for the simultaneous detection of up to 37 target fish species in a single sample. Using these primer sets can reduce the cost and time needed to perform future studies of fish communities. Our results comparing multiple …

Oil Spills Detection By Means Of Uas And Low-Cost Airborne Thermal Sensors, A. Al-Shammari, Eugene Levin, R. Shults

School of Technology Publications

This paper provides an overview of oil spill scenarios and the remote sensing methods used for detection and mapping the spills. It also discusses the different kinds of thermal sensors used in oil spills detection. As UAS is becoming an important player in the oil and gas industry for the low operating costs involved, this research involved working with a cheap thermal airborne sensor mounted on DJI Phantom 4 system. Data were collected in two scenarios, first scenario is collecting data in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula at a petroleum company location and the second scenario was an indoor experiment simulating an …

An Introduction To Psychological Statistics, Garett C. Foster, David Lane, David Scott, Mikki Hebl, Rudy Guerra, Dan Osherson, Heidi Zimmer

Open Educational Resources Collection

This work has been superseded by Introduction to Statistics in the Psychological Sciences available from https://irl.umsl.edu/oer/25/.

-

We are constantly bombarded by information, and finding a way to filter that information in an objective way is crucial to surviving this onslaught with your sanity intact. This is what statistics, and logic we use in it, enables us to do. Through the lens of statistics, we learn to find the signal hidden in the noise when it is there and to know when an apparent trend or pattern is really just randomness. The study of statistics involves math and relies …

Project Management Madness: 3 Key Programs For Communication, Personal Tasks And Large Projects, Rachel S. Evans

Presentations

No matter what member of a team you are, be it content editor, web designer, database manager or systems administrator, getting things done and meeting goals depends largely on how you communicate with one another, handle your time and effectively collaborate on small and big projects. This session will use our own team's preferred platforms to show specific examples of how we are managing our taskflow across three different programs to tackle business as usual, short and long term work, and major special projects.

The three programs that will be compared for pros, cons, and their integration with one another …

Evaluation Of Spatial Generalization Characteristics Of A Robust Classifier As Applied To Coral Reef Habitats In Remote Islands Of The Pacific Ocean, Justin J. Gapper, Hesham El-Askary, Erik J. Linstead, Thomas Piechota

Mathematics, Physics, and Computer Science Faculty Articles and Research

This study was an evaluation of the spectral signature generalization properties of coral across four remote Pacific Ocean reefs. The sites under consideration have not been the subject of previous studies for coral classification using remote sensing data. Previous research regarding using remote sensing to identify reefs has been limited to in-situ assessment, with some researchers also performing temporal analysis of a selected area of interest. This study expanded the previous in-situ analyses by evaluating the ability of a basic predictor, Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA), trained on Depth Invariant Indices calculated from the spectral signature of coral in one location …

Exploring The Neural Mechanisms Of Physics Learning, Jessica E. Bartley

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation presents a series of neuroimaging investigations and achievements that strive to deepen and broaden our understanding of human problem solving and physics learning. Neuroscience conceives of dynamic relationships between behavior, experience, and brain structure and function, but how neural changes enable human learning across classroom instruction remains an open question. At the same time, physics is a challenging area of study in which introductory students regularly struggle to achieve success across university instruction. Research and initiatives in neuroeducation promise a new understanding into the interactions between biology and education, including the neural mechanisms of learning and development. These …

A Story Of Data Won, Data Lost And Data Re-Found: The Realities Of Ecological Data Preservation, Alison Specht

DataONE Sociocultural and Usability & Assessment Working Groups

This paper discusses the process of retrieval and updating legacy data to allow on-line discovery and delivery. There are many pitfalls of institutional and non-institutional ecological data conservation over the long term. Interruptions to custodianship, old media, lost knowledge and the continuous evolution of species names makes resurrection of old data challenging. We caution against technological arrogance and emphasise the importance of international standards.

We use a case study of a compiled set of continent-wide vegetation survey data for which, although the analyses had been published, the raw data had not. In the original study, publications containing plot data collected …

Elevation And Azimuth-Aided Channel Estimation Scheme For Airborne Hyperspectral Data Transmission, Vahid Vahidi, Ebrahim Saberinia

Electrical & Computer Engineering Faculty Research

A channel-estimation (CE) scheme is proposed to estimate the complex amplitude, Doppler shift, angle-of-departure, and angle-of-arrival of the channel taps for sparse and doubly selective channels for hyperspectral image transmission from unmanned aircraft vehicles (UAVs) to ground stations. The proposed method is dubbed as compressed-sensing joint parameter estimation (CS-JPE) and finds the channel parameters matrix by employing a compressed-sensing (CS)-based method. Afterward, a modified version of the joint parameter estimation (JPE) is proposed as CS-JPE and is dubbed as M-CS-JPE, which employs the elevation-azimuth angles of the line-of-sight channel tap to estimate the channel parameters with higher accuracy and lower …

Examining Patterns In Nest Predation Using Artificial Nests, Victoria L. Simonsen

School of Natural Resources: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

The use of artificial nests to study the predation of avian nests has faced disregard by ecologists due to inconsistencies found between the survival rates of real and artificial nests across studies and reviews. The negative perception of artificial nests providing an inconsistent assessment of survival has thus fostered the perception that artificial nests are a secondary option to be used to overcome logistical hurdles associated with achieving sufficient sample sizes in systems where study species are rare or elusive, or as merely a preliminary method to study predation across gradients. We argue that the greatest mistake ecologists have made …

Addressing Environmental Gentrification: Improving Environmental Health For Children And Youth Without Displacement, Tania Schusler, Amy Krings

Center for the Human Rights of Children

This research brief aims to consider how community members and policies might improve environmental amenities within contaminated communities without displacing existing residents. To this end, we will first introduce a concept known as environmental gentrification. We will then summarize some of the existing literature that explores the relationships between urban greening and brownfield redevelopment projects in relation to gentrification. Brownfields refer to properties where the presence or potential presence of a hazardous substance, pollutant, or contaminant may complicate the property’s expansion, redevelopment, or reuse (https://www.epa.gov/brownfields/overview-brownfields- program). Our review of literature indicates that the degree of gentrification associated with sustainable development …

Niobrara National Scenic River, Socioeconomic Monitoring Pilot Implementation, Summer 2016, Resource Systems Group

United States National Park Service: Publications

Executive Summary

This report describes the results of a visitor study at Niobrara National Scenic River (NSR) conducted from July 15 through July 24, 2016. During the sampling period, 253 visitor groups were contacted to participate in the survey. Of those groups, 217 agreed to participate in the study by accepting a mail-back survey packet. Questionnaires were completed and returned by 110 visitor groups, resulting in a completion rate of 51% among those visitor groups that agreed to participate in the study and an overall response rate of 43% for the study.

 This report profiles a systematic random sample …

Quality Assurance Plan For Monitoring White-Tailed Deer In The Heartland Inventory And Monitoring Network, United States National Park Service, Heartland Inventory And Monitoring Network

United States National Park Service: Publications

Abstract

In accordance with guidelines set forth by the National Park Service Inventory and Monitoring Division, a quality-assurance plan has been created for use by the Heartland Inventory and Monitoring Network in the implementation of the White-tailed Deer Monitoring Protocol (HTLN 2018). This quality-assurance plan documents the standards, policies, and procedures used by the Heartland Network for activities related to the collection, processing, storage, analysis, and publication of monitoring data. The policies and procedures documented in this quality-assurance plan complement the quality-assurance plans for other monitoring activities conducted by the Heartland Network and supplement the National Inventory and Monitoring Division …

Non-Manual Articulators In Irish Sign Language Verbs: An Analysis With Data Mining Association Rules, Robert G. Smith, Markus Hofmann

Conference Papers

The Signs of Ireland (SOI) corpus (Leeson et al., 2006) deploys a complex multi-tiered temporal data structure. The process of manually analyzing such data is laborious, cannot eliminate bias and often, important patterns can go completely unnoticed. In addition to this, as a result of the complex nature of grammatical structures contained in the corpus, identifying complex linguistic associations or patterns across tiers is simply too intricate a task for a human to carry out in an acceptable timeframe. This work explores the application of data mining techniques on a set of multi-tiered temporal data from the SOI corpus. Building …

Bhutan Landscape Anomaly: Possible Effect On Himalayan Economy (In View Of Optimal Description Of Elevation Profiles), Thach N. Nguyen, Laxman Bokati, Aaron A. Velasco, Vladik Kreinovich

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

Economies of countries located in seismic zones are strongly effected by this seismicity. If we underestimate the seismic activity, then a reasonably routine earthquake can severely damage the existing structures and thus, lead to huge economic losses. On the other hand, if we overestimate the seismic activity, we waste a lot of resources on unnecessarily fortifying all the buildings -- and this too harms the economies. From this viewpoint, it is desirable to have estimations of regional seismic activities which are as accurate as possible. Current predictions are mostly based on the standard geophysical understanding of earthquakes as being largely …

Ensuring Compliance From 35,000 Feet: Accountability And Trade-Offs In Aviation Safety Regulatory Networks, Russell W. Mills, Christopher J. Koliba, Dorit Rubinstein Reiss

College of Agriculture and Life Sciences Faculty Publications

A puzzle that faces public administrators within regulatory networks is how to balance the need for public or democratic accountability with increasing demands from interest groups and elected officials to utilize the expertise of the private sector in developing process-oriented programs that ensure compliance. This article builds upon the network governance accountability framework developed by Koliba, Mills, and Zia to explore the dominant accountability frames and the accountability trade-offs that shape the process-oriented regulatory regime used by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to oversee and regulate air carriers in the United States.

Recommending Who To Follow In The Software Engineering Twitter Space, Abhabhisheksh Sharma, Yuan Tian, Agus Sulistya, Dinusha Wijedasa, David Lo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

With the advent of social media, developers are increasingly using it in their software development activities. Twitter is one of the popular social mediums used by developers. A recent study by Singer et al. found that software developers use Twitter to “keep up with the fast-paced development landscape.” Unfortunately, due to the general-purpose nature of Twitter, it’s challenging for developers to use Twitter for their development activities. Our survey with 36 developers who use Twitter in their development activities highlights that developers are interested in following specialized software gurus who share relevant technical tweets.To help developers perform this task, in …

Comparing Elm With Svm In The Field Of Sentiment Classification Of Social Media Text Data, Zhihuan Chen, Zhaoxia Wang, Zhiping Lin, Ting Yang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Machine learning has been used in various fields with thousands of applications. Extreme learning machine (ELM), which is the most recently developed machine learning algorithm, has become increasingly popular for its good generalization ability. However, it has been relatively less applied to the domain of social media. Support Vector Machine (SVM), another popular learning-based algorithm, has been applied for sentiment classification of social media text data and has obtained good results. This paper investigates and compares the capabilities of these two learning-based methods in the field of sentiment classification of social media. The results indicate that SVM can obtain good …

Imaginary People Representing Real Numbers: Generating Personas From Online Social Media Data, Jisun An, Haewoon Kwak, Soongyo Jung, Joni Salminen, M. Admad, Bernard J. Jansen

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We develop a methodology to automate creating imaginary people, referred to as personas, by processing complex behavioral and demographic data of social media audiences. From a popular social media account containing more than 30 million interactions by viewers from 198 countries engaging with more than 4,200 online videos produced by a global media corporation, we demonstrate that our methodology has several novel accomplishments, including: (a) identifying distinct user behavioral segments based on the user content consumption patterns; (b) identifying impactful demographics groupings; and (c) creating rich persona descriptions by automatically adding pertinent attributes, such as names, photos, and personal characteristics. …

How Sending E-Mails Compares With Carbon Emission Of Car Use, Thomas Menkhoff

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

Digitalnatives can reduce their carbon footprint by being conscious about Internetusage. Everwondered how your e-mails may contribute to your personal carbon footprint? Accordingto estimates published in Phys.org, sending a short e-mail adds about 4g of CO2equivalent (gCO2e) to the atmosphere (an e-mail with a long attachment has atenfold carbon footprint, that is 50 gCO2e.

Improving Multi-Label Emotion Classification Via Sentiment Classification With Dual Attention Transfer Network, Jianfei Yu, Luis Marujo, Jing Jiang, Pradeep Karuturi, William Brendel

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this paper, we target at improving the performance of multi-label emotion classification with the help of sentiment classification. Specifically, we propose a new transfer learning architecture to divide the sentence representation into two different feature spaces, which are expected to respectively capture the general sentiment words and the other important emotion-specific words via a dual attention mechanism. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our transfer learning approach can outperform several strong baselines and achieve the state-of-the-art performance on two benchmark datasets.

Linky: Visualizing User Identity Linkage Results For Multiple Online Social Networks (Demo), Roy Ka-Wei Lee, Ming Shan Hee, Philips Kokoh Prasetyo, Ee-Peng Lim

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

User identity linkage across online social networks is an emerging research topic that has attracted attention in recent years. Many user identity linkage methods have been proposed so far and most of them utilize user profile, content and network information to determine if two social media accounts belong to the same person. In most cases, user identity linkage methods are evaluated by performing some prediction tasks with the results presented using some overall accuracy measures. However, the methods are rarely compared at the individual user level where a predicted matched (or linked) pair of user identities from different online social …

Centroid-Amenities: An Interactive Visual Analytical Tool For Exploring And Analyzing Amenities In Singapore, Xue Qian Jazreel Siew, Sean Jia Ming Koh

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Planning for civic amenities in a fast-changing urban setting such as Singapore is never an easy task. And as urban planners look toward more data-driven approaches toward urban planning, so grows the demand for more flexible geospatial analytics tools to facilitate a more iterative and granular approach toward urban planning. Such specific tools however, are not always readily available as plugins for traditional desktop GIS software, as numerous customizations must be made to model specific temporal planning scenarios for quick analysis, which could prove both costly and time-consuming. Hence, to address this need, open-source tools such as R Shiny could …

Acidity And Antioxidant Activity Of Cold Brew Coffee., Niny Z. Rao, Megan Fuller

College of Life Sciences Faculty Papers

The acidity and antioxidant activity of cold brew coffee were investigated using light roast coffees from Brazil, two regions of Ethiopia, Columbia, Myanmar, and Mexico. The concentrations of three caffeoylquinic acid (CQA) isomers were also determined. Cold brew coffee chemistry was compared to that of hot brew coffee prepared with the same grind-to-coffee ratio. The pH values of the cold and hot brew samples were found to be comparable, ranging from 4.85 to 5.13. The hot brew coffees were found to have higher concentrations of total titratable acids, as well as higher antioxidant activity, than that of their cold brew …

A Mixed Method Study Of Prospective Teachers' Epistemic Beliefs And Web Evaluation Strategies Concerning Hoax Websites, Jennifer Coccaro-Pons

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Teachers need to be equipped with the tools necessary to evaluate content on the Internet and determine if it is a credible source, or a hoax website since they are expected to instruct and prepare students on how to evaluate the sites which is now a relevant phenomenon. The purpose of the mixed‑method study was to obtain an understanding of the web evaluation strategies of prospective teachers regarding the evaluation of hoax websites and how their epistemic beliefs may influence their evaluation. Another aspect of this study was to find out what outcomes resulted from providing guidance, or not to …

Elemental Analysis Of Adhesive Tapes By Laser-Based Methods, Claudia Martinez Lopez

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Adhesive tapes are a common type of evidence involved in violent crimes and national security threats. This research evaluated the utility of LA-ICP-MS and LIBS for the characterization of the trace elemental signature in adhesive tapes for forensic comparisons. LA-ICP-MS and LIBS methods were developed, for the first time, for the qualitative and quantitative analysis of adhesive tapes.

The backings of 90 black electrical tapes, previously characterized by conventional techniques (physical examination, IR, Py-GC-MS, and SEM-EDS), were analyzed by LA-ICP-MS to evaluate the ability of the technique to discriminate samples originating from different sources and to associate pieces of tapes …

Integrating Multiple Genetic Detection Methods To Estimate Population Density Of Social And Territorial Carnivores, Sean M. Murphy, Ben C. Augustine, Jennifer R. Adams, Lisette P. Waits, John J. Cox

Forestry and Natural Resources Faculty Publications

Spatial capture–recapture models can produce unbiased estimates of population density, but sparse detection data often plague studies of social and territorial carnivores. Integrating multiple types of detection data can improve estimation of the spatial scale parameter (σ), activity center locations, and density. Noninvasive genetic sampling is effective for detecting carnivores, but social structure and territoriality could cause differential detectability among population cohorts for different detection methods. Using three observation models, we evaluated the integration of genetic detection data from noninvasive hair and scat sampling of the social and territorial coyote (Canis latrans). Although precision of estimated density was …

Fundamental Mechanistic Studies On The Ultrasonic Treatment Of Problematic Water Pollutants And Toxins, Danni Cui

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Problematic organic pollutants in industrial and drinking water sources are a leading cause of water scarcity. Among the advanced oxidation processes, sonolytic degradation has received considerable attention because it combines oxidation processes initiated by reactive oxidant species and a pyrolysis processes associated with the high temperatures produced during cavitation.

The degradation of the semi-volatile compound, MCHM, was rapid and followed pseudo-first order kinetics. The Freundlich kinetic model for heterogeneous systems was successfully applied to describe the non-uniform distribution of MCHM at the gas-liquid interface during ultrasonic treatment. Two primary products were confirmed by GC-MS. Computational studies were also applied to …

The 'New Normal' Of Flooding In Portsmouth, Virginia: Perspectives, Experiences, And Adaptive Responses Of Residents And Business Owners In Low To Moderate-Income Communities, Donta Council, Michelle Covi, Wie Yusuf, Joshua Behr, Makayla Brown, Old Dominion University Resilience Collaborative, Virginia Sea Grant

Presentations, Lectures, Posters, Reports

[First three paragraphs from the Summary]

This project is a part of a broader initiative - the Resilience Adaptation Feasibility Tool (RAFT) - that addresses the daunting challenges coastal communities are facing related to sea level rise and climate change (more information about RAFT is available here: https://ien.virginia.edu/raft).

This aim of this project was to investigate how residents and business owners in low-to-moderate income communities in Portsmouth, Virginia cope with flooding, and to assess implications for how the local government can better engage with residents to better meet their information needs so they can be more resilient to flooding. The …

Challenges For Flight Instructors Teaching Weather Information, Robert Thomas, Thomas A. Guinn

Aviation Weather Training Research

• Flight Instructors face a challenge when teaching/learning weather information
• Multiple overlapping resources for aviation weather
• AC takes longer timeframe to update –problem for quick updates of information

Assessing Ga Pilots' Preflight Weather Planning Mental Models, Yolanda Ortiz, Beth Blickensderfer, Thomas A. Guinn

General Aviation Weather Display Interpretation

Purpose, To assess GA Pilots' ability to:

• Obtain the Appropriate Weather Information
• Interpret the Data
• Apply the Information to a Given Flight Route