Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Evolving An Information Systems Capstone Course To Align With The Fast Changing Singapore Marketplace, Chris Boesch, Benjamin Kok Siew Gan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Every year, around fifty-five undergraduate teams of four to six students are required to complete a capstone course for the School of Information Systems at Singapore Management University. Each team spends approximately five months working with an industry sponsor using the latest tools and techniques. Students actively learn by implementing the system to solve a real world problem. In addition to delivering value to the local sponsor, our students learn specialized skills currently needed in the marketplace, which might not yet be incorporated into electives and core courses. In this paper, we discuss the tradeoffs of providing students and project …

An Air Index For Spatial Query Processing In Road Networks, Weiwei Sun, Chunan Chen, Baihua Zheng, Chong Chen, Peng Liu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Spatial queries such as range query and kNN query in road networks have received a growing number of attention in real life. Considering the large population of the users and the high overhead of network distance computation, it is extremely important to guarantee the efficiency and scalability of query processing. Motivated by the scalable and secure properties of wireless broadcast model, this paper presents an air index called Network Partition Index (NPI) to support efficient spatial query processing in road networks via wireless broadcast. The main idea is to partition the road network into a number of regions and then …

Socio-Physical Analytics: Challenges & Opportunities, Archan Misra, Kasthuri Jayarajah, Shriguru Nayak, Philips Kokoh Prasetyo, Ee-Peng Lim

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this paper, we argue for expanded research into an area called Socio-Physical Analytics, that focuses on combining the behavioral insight gained from mobile-sensing based monitoring of physical behavior with the inter-personal relationships and preferences deduced from online social networks. We highlight some of the research challenges in combining these heterogeneous data sources and then describe some examples of our ongoing work (based on real-world data being collected at SMU) that illustrate two aspects of socio-physical analytics: (a) how additional demographic and online analytics based attributes can potentially provide better insights into the preferences and behaviors of individuals or groups …

Does Latitude Hurt While Longitude Kills? Geographical And Temporal Separation In A Large Scale Software Development Project, Patrick Wagstrom, Subhajit Datta

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Distributed software development allows firms to leverage cost advantages and place work near centers of competency. This distribution comes at a cost -- distributed teams face challenges from differing cultures, skill levels, and a lack of shared working hours. In this paper we examine whether and how geographic and temporal separation in a large scale distributed software development influences developer interactions. We mine the work item trackers for a large commercial software project with a globally distributed development team. We examine both the time to respond and the propensity of individuals to respond and find that when taken together, geographic …

Democracy Of Deeds And Voices, David Chan

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

In an invited commentary, SMU Behavioural Sciences Institute Director Professor David Chan discussed the nature of a negativity mindset and how to foster positivity in Singapore. He suggested that Singapore should be a “democracy of deeds and voices” and build psychological capital as a core resource.

Tort Law, Kumaralingam Amirthalingam, Gary Kok Yew Chan

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

Teo Wei Hsin Lawrence (Zhang Weixin), Tin Yan Ying Geraldine (Cheng Yanying Geraldine) v Management Corporation Strata Title Plan No 1525 [2014] SGDC 350 involved a suit by the owners of a condominium unit (the plaintiffs) against the management corporation of the development (the defendant). Three months after purchasing the unit, the plaintiffs undertook renovation works which were completed after about five months. Prior to moving in, the plaintiffs discovered mould on the interior walls and on their new cabinets located at the rear end of the unit. As the unit was in the corner of the development, the outside …

Debate On Bernard Yack’S Book Nationalism And The Moral Psychology Of Community, Jonathan Hearn, Chandran Kukathas, David Miller, Bernard Yack

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Bernard Yack's Nationalism and the Moral Psychology of Community (2012) was the subject of the eighth in a long‐running series of debates hosted by the Association for the Study of Ethnicity and Nationalism (ASEN) and the journal Nations and Nationalism in November of 2013. These debates bring together the authors of recent important works in the study of nationalism and ethnicity with appropriate scholars to explore the questions they have provoked. On this occasion Professor Yack was joined by Professor Chandran Kukathas and Professor David Miller.

Crowdsourcing The Policy Cycle, John Prpić, Araz Taeihagh, James Melton

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Crowdsourcing is beginning to be used for policymaking. The “wisdom of crowds” [Surowiecki 2005], and crowdsourcing [Brabham 2008], are seen as new avenues that can shape all kinds of policy, from transportation policy [Nash 2009] to urban planning [Seltzer and Mahmoudi 2013], to climate policy. In general, many have high expectations for positive outcomes with crowdsourcing, and based on both anecdotal and empirical evidence, some of these expectations seem justified [Majchrzak and Malhotra 2013]. Yet, to our knowledge, research has yet to emerge that unpacks the different forms of crowdsourcing in light of each stage of the well-established policy cycle. …

A Seed Dataset For A Public, Temporal Data Repository For Energy Informatics Research On Commercial Building Performance, Clayton Miller, Zoltán Nagy, Arno Schlueter

Research Collection College of Integrative Studies

Building performance research using various informatics techniques has progressed extensively in the last twenty years by advancing the fields of automated fault detection and diagnostics (AFDD), commissioning, data mining, and visualization for commercial buildings. Despite this effort, it has been difficult to understand the effectiveness of different approaches as compared to each other as there is a lack of general, public benchmarking datasets for this industry. We propose a repository in which researchers can release their detailed raw datasets for the purpose of repeatability, benchmarking, and utilization by other researchers. We start this effort through the public release of a …

Online Community Transition Detection, Biying Tan, Feida Zhu, Qiang Qu, Siyuan Liu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Mining user behavior patterns in social networks is of great importance in user behavior analysis, targeted marketing, churn prediction and other applications. However, less effort has been made to study the evolution of user behavior in social communities. In particular, users join and leave communities over time. How to automatically detect the online community transitions of individual users is a research problem of immense practical value yet with great technical challenges. In this paper, we propose an algorithm based on the Minimum Description Length (MDL) principle to trace the evolution of community transition of individual users, adaptive to the noisy …

Latinos In Massachusetts Public Schools: Springfield, Michael Berardino

Gastón Institute Publications

This report provides a snapshot of current educational outcomes of Latino students in the city of Springfield. It is based on publicly available data from the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (MADESE) that have been analyzed by the Gastón Institute for a community meeting in Springfield. This report uses the ethno-racial categories assigned by MADESE. It focuses on the evolving demographic trends and the most recent educational outcomes of Latino students relative to other ethno-racial groups in the school district and to students statewide. The first section illustrates the demographic shift occurring in the Springfield Public Schools, with …

Latinos In Massachusetts Public Schools: Pittsfield, Michael Berardino, Valerie Watson

Gastón Institute Publications

This report provides a snapshot of current educational outcomes of Latino students in the city of Pittsfield. It is based on publicly available data from the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (MADESE) that has been analyzed by the Gastón Institute for the 2014 Latinos in Massachusetts Regional Meeting in Pittsfield. This report uses the ethno-racial categories assigned by MADESE. It focuses on the evolving demographic trends and the most recent educational outcomes of Latino students relative to other ethno-racial groups in the school district and to students statewide. The first section illustrates the demographic shift occurring within the …

Latinos In Massachusetts Selected Areas: Pittsfield, Phillip Granberry, Sarah Rustan, Mayara Fontes, Michael Berardino

Gastón Institute Publications

This report provides a snapshot of selected economic, social, educational, and demographic indicators pertaining to Latinos in Pittsfield. It reflects a commitment by UMass Boston’s Mauricio Gastón Institute for Latino Community Development and Public Policy to provide periodic updates on the Latino population in Massachusetts.

The report on Pittsfield is part of a larger series that covers cities in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts with a significant population of Latinos. This report analyzes data from the 2008-2012 American Community Survey (ACS), conducted by the U.S. Census Bureau. We obtained the data from the American Factfinder website in tabular form and transformed …

The Significance Of Marriage Intensives: A Multi-Perspective Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis Of Couples' Post Intensive Experience, Tara Lalonde

Doctoral Dissertations and Projects

At a time when divorce rates remain at 50% regardless of treatment efforts, this interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA) explored and compared how couples made sense of their marriage experience one year after intensive marriage therapy for couples who found it significant and were able to maintain gains, and for couples who initially found it helpful but were unable to maintain gains. Three couples in each category were interviewed and compared resulting in six themes emerging from each group. Two additional overarching themes of regenerated versus disheartened and intrinsic versus extrinsic motivation and change emerged to clearly distinguish the two groups …

Normalizing Sexual Violence: Young Women Account For Harassment And Abuse, Heather R. Hlavka

Social and Cultural Sciences Faculty Research and Publications

Despite high rates of gendered violence among youth, very few young women report these incidents to authority figures. This study moves the discussion from the question of why young women do not report them toward how violence is produced, maintained, and normalized among youth. The girls in this study often did not name what law, researchers, and educators commonly identify as sexual harassment and abuse. How then, do girls name and make sense of victimization? Exploring violence via the lens of compulsory heterosexuality highlights the relational dynamics at play in this naming process. Forensic interviews with youth revealed patterns of …

From Militia To Police: The Path Of Russian Law Enforcement Reforms, Olga Semukhina

Social and Cultural Sciences Faculty Research and Publications

This article outlines the major events of the 2011 police reform in Russia and discusses the recent changes in the structure and function of the Ministry of Interior Affairs (MVD) implemented by Minister Vladimir Kolokol'tsev in 2012–2014. The analysis suggests that despite its limitations, the 2011 police reform reduced public tensions surrounding the issue of “bad and corrupt” police in Russia that were evident in 2009–2010.

Practice Makes Perfect: Updating Borrowing Policies And Procedures At A Small Academic Library, Crystal Boyce

Scholarly Publications

In 2011, staff from the undergraduate libraries at the College of William & Mary came together to evaluate circulation policies related to borrowing periods and billing. In an attempt to better align the policies across each unit, and with the intention of creating a more consistent user experience, new policies were proposed and implemented in the fall of 2012. These changes were found to dramatically decrease staff time necessary for billing, while improving user satisfaction with the borrowing policies. Significantly fewer books went into billing, suggesting no adverse effects on collection maintenance.

Diffusion And Learning: Twenty Years Of Sports Betting Culture In Finland, Matias Karekallas, Pauliina Raento, Taina Renkonen

UNLV Gaming Research & Review Journal

How did people learn to bet on sports and how did a sports betting culture develop in Finland? How has this setting evolved over space and time? The answers contribute to the growing understanding of learning, socialization, and contextualization in the study of gambling and may inspire service providers, regulators, and harm preventers alike. We argue that broad structural patterns and micro-cultural processes should be investigated jointly and qualitative information should complement quantitative monitoring of human behavior. We approach the spread of sports betting to, and within Finland, from the perspective of innovation diffusion. We rely on this theory’s space- …

Games Of Life And Death: The Judicial Uses Of Dice In Eighteenth And Nineteenth-Century Sweden, Per Binde

UNLV Gaming Research & Review Journal

Gambling studies should take a broad view of the field and consider activities that are not strictly gambling but similar to it, such as cleromancy and secular uses of drawing of lots, to give us perspective on societal and cultural aspects of gambling. This paper presents historical data on judicial uses of throwing dice in eighteenth and nineteenth-century Sweden. The focus is on cases of manslaughter with multiple perpetrators who were considered equally guilty and were forced by the criminal court to throw dice to determine who should be executed and who should receive lesser penalties. Three principles are distinguished …

Scholarworks Usage Report, 05-2014, Scholarworks

ScholarWorks Reports

This report contains download and page view statistics for ScholarWorks, May 2014.

America's Heroes And Darlings: The Media Portrayal Of Male And Female Athletes During The 2014 Sochi Games, Matthew K. Curtis

Theses and Dissertations

It has been well documented that female athletes receive much less media attention than male athletes, with estimates placing coverage of male athletes at 95% of all sport-related media (Coakley, 1986). While not to that extent, studies focusing on media portrayals of Olympic athletes also confirm that the media dedicates the majority of coverage to male athletes (Duncan, 1990; Duncan & Hasbrook, 1988; Hambrick, Simmons, Greenhalgh, & Greenwell, 2010; Higgs, Weiller, & Martin, 2003; Lee, 1992; Kinnick, 1998; Pfister, 1978). Some evidence suggests that media coverage of female athletes and the recognition of their achievements are slowly increasing (Higgs et …

Investigation Of Historical Japanese Paper: An Experiment To Recreate Recycled Paper From 18th-19th Century Japan, Kazuko Hioki

Library Presentations

This presentation will discuss the physical characteristics of recycled paper used for Japanese printed books from the18th to 19th century, exploring their production methods and historical developments based on the collaborative experiments with the University of Iowa’s Center for the Book (UICB).

The majority of conservation practices and studies of traditional Japanese paper-based artifacts have focused on the high end arts such as screen paintings and scrolls, luxuriously printed books (such as Sagabon), and certain ukiyoe prints and paintings. Conservators generally have limited knowledge about the printed books and materials used; however, they are the most commonly found traditional Japanese …

Policy Direction For The Budget, Ishrat Husain Dr.

Faculty Research - Newspaper and Magazine Articles

The contours of the upcoming budget in terms of size, outlays, revenue collection targets, fiscal deficit etc. have been spelled out by the finance minister at various fora and by the IMF in its reports. So, it is not very interesting to speculate on whether the tax targets are ambitious, expenditures understated and subsidies underplayed.

The purpose here is to suggest that budgetary estimates and projections should be formulated in the context of a medium-term policy framework. The objectives of such a framework should be: to accelerate the rate of economic growth and job creation; to keep inflationary expectations under …

Where Do Mount Baker Snoqualmie National Forest Visitors Go And Which Roads Do They Use To Get There? An Analysis Of The Spatial Data From The 2013 Sustainable Roads Workshops, Rebecca J. Mclain, David Banis, Alexa Todd, Mike Psaris

Geography Faculty Publications and Presentations

This report provides an overview of the key patterns that emerged from the spatial analyses of the destination and route data collected during the 2013 Sustainable Roads workshops on the Mount Baker Snoqualmie (MBS) National Forest. We excluded the pilot workshop data from the analyses because a somewhat different process was used to collect the mapped data. The data used in the analysis was collected from 262 participants in eight workshops (Bellingham, Sedro-Woolley, Darrington, Monroe, Everett, Seattle, Issaquah, Enumclaw). During the workshops, participants mapped up to eight destinations of importance to them, and in most cases, also mapped the routes …

Can Retributivism Be Saved?, Chad Flanders

BYU Law Review

Retributive theory has long held pride of place among theories of criminal punishment in both philosophy and in law. It has seemed, at various times, either much more intuitive, or rationally persuasive, or simply more normatively right than other theories. But retributive theory is limited, both in theory and practice, and in many of its versions is best conceived not as a theory of punishment in its own right, but instead as shorthand for a set of constraints on the exercise of punishment. Whether some version of retributive theory is a live possibility in the contemporary world remains very much …

Aligning Corporate And Community Interests: From Abominable To Symbiotic, Barnali Choudhury

BYU Law Review

No abstract provided.

Developing An Ontario Maple Syrup Sector Profile: A Value Chain Analysis (Executive Summary), Grant Morin, Brenda Murphy

Contemporary Studies

Through a sectorial profile, this study identifies the maple syrup value chain’s key players, processes, activities and inter-intra industry relationships (social capital) providing baseline data on the current status of the industry and an overall picture of the maple syrup value chain for members and new entrants. The study found that a) technological advancements over the years have lead to great efficiencies and eased the labour requirement; b) that strong social connections have great impact on marketing and retail of syrup; c) that innovation is found not only through research and development sectors of large companies but also from a …

Maple Syrup Value Systems And Value Chains - Considering Aboriginal And Non-Aboriginal Perspectives, Brenda Murphy, Annette Chrétien, Grant Morin

Contemporary Studies

Harvested from both intensive sugar maple stands and diverse mixed forest ecosystems across Ontario, maple syrup is an important rural and Aboriginal non-timber forest product that contributes to social, economic and environmental sustainability. This paper presents our ongoing work to map Ontario’s maple syrup value system from two different perspectives, Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal. In the economic sense, analyses of value systems are useful for members to identify the opportunities and challenges they are facing to advance industry growth and innovation. In the social and environmental sense, these analyses provide a window into how different worldviews and belief systems can lead …

Self-Publishing: A New Challenge For Universal Bibliographic Control, Robert P. Holley

School of Information Sciences Faculty Research Publications

Self-publishing in the United States has increased to between 50-75% of book titles published annually, facilitated by the popularity of ebooks and print-on-demand. Amazon.com and other companies have encouraged the trend by paying royalties and providing support to authors. This increase in self-published materials poses a new challenge for Universal Bibliographic Control (UBC). Today, UBC is much different in the age of information overload compared with the relative information scarcity before the arrival of the Internet. Libraries have nonetheless retained an interest in bibliographically controlling traditional books. Self-published books can be indistinguishable from trade publications but fall outside many of …

Developing An Ontario Maple Syrup Sector Profile: A Value Chain Analysis, Grant Morin

Geography and Environmental Studies Major Research Papers

Through a sectorial profile, this study identifies the maple syrup value chain’s key players, processes, activities and inter-intra industry relationships (social capital) providing baseline data on the current status of the industry and an overall picture of the maple syrup value chain for members and new entrants. The study found that a) technological advancements over the years have lead to great efficiencies and eased the labour requirement; b) that strong social connections have great impact on marketing and retail of syrup; c) that innovation is found not only through research and development sectors of large companies but also from a …