Science and Technology Studies Commons^™

Reviews And End Matter

BEADS: Journal of the Society of Bead Researchers

Zhongguo gudai zhuzi (Chinese Ancient Beads), by Zhu Xiaoli, reviewed by Valerie Hector

Journal: Borneo International Beads Conference 2013, edited by Heidi Munan and Kay Margaret Lyons, reviewed by Karlis Karklins

Glass Beads: Selections from The Corning Museum of Glass, by Adrienne V. Gennett, reviewed by Gretchen Dunn.

Bargaining With The Machine: A Framework For Describing Encounters With Surveillance Technologies, Robert Pallitto

Political Science Publications

Relationships between surveillance and inequality (e.g., as surveillance is used for domination, as surveillance affects subjects’ life-chances) have been a central concern of surveillance studies scholars. This concern with inequalities that are produced and sustained by surveillance runs parallel to the longstanding interest of many social theorists more generally with the unequal workings of power in nominally free societies. How is inequality sustained without resort to force? Why do people consent to subjugation? Some form of ideology critique is often employed to answer such questions. However, the work of Rosen (1996) and others has cast serious doubt on the ability …

A Hybrid Approach To Finding Relevant Social Media Content For Complex Domain Specific Information Needs, Delroy H. Cameron, Amit P. Sheth, Nishita Jaykumar, Gaurish Anand, Krishnaprasad Thirunarayan, Gary Alan Smith

Kno.e.sis Publications

While contemporary semantic search systems offer to improve classical keyword-based search, they are not always adequate for complex, domain specific information needs. Some complex search situations require knowledge of both ontological concepts as well as 'intelligible constructs' not typically modeled in ontologies. Intelligible constructs convey essential information, which may be important to the holistic information needs of information seekers. Such constructs may include notions of intensity, frequency, interval, dosage, emotion, sentiment, equivalence, synonymy, negation, parts-of-speech, etc. However, few search systems utilize both structured background knowledge (ontologies) and the aforementioned knowledge for query interpretation in domain specific searches. Instead, there is …

Traffic Analytics Using Probabilistic Graphical Models Enhanced With Knowledge Bases, Pramod Anantharam, Krishnaprasad Thirunarayan, Amit P. Sheth

Kno.e.sis Publications

Graphical models have been successfully used to deal with uncertainty, incompleteness, and dynamism within many domains. These models built from data often ignore preexisting declarative knowledge about the domain in the form of ontologies and Linked Open Data (LOD) that is increasingly available on the web. In this paper, we present an approach to leverage such 'top-down' domain knowledge to enhance 'bottom-up' building of graphical models. Specifically, we propose three operations on the graphical model structure to enrich it with nodes, edges, and edge directions. We illustrate the enrichment process using traffic data from 511.org and declarative knowledge from ConceptNet. …

Advancing Data Reuse In Phyloinformatics Using An Ontology-Driven Semantic Web Approach, Maryam Panahiazar, Amit P. Sheth, Ajith Harshana Ranabahu, Rutger Vos, Jim Leebens-Mack

Kno.e.sis Publications

Phylogenetic analyses can resolve historical relationships among genes, organisms or higher taxa. Understanding such relationships can elucidate a wide range of biological phenomena, including, for example, the importance of gene and genome duplications in the evolution of gene function, the role of adaptation as a driver of diversification, or the evolutionary consequences of biogeographic shifts. Phyloinformaticists are developing data standards, databases and communication protocols (e.g. Application Programming Interfaces, APIs) to extend the accessibility of gene trees, species trees, and the metadata necessary to interpret these trees, thus enabling researchers across the life sciences to reuse phylogenetic knowledge. Specifically, Semantic Web …

Twitris: Socially Influenced Browsing, Ashutosh Sopan Jadhav, Wenbo Wang, Raghava Mutharaju, Pramod Anantharam, Vinh Nguyen, Amit P. Sheth, Karthik Gomadam, Meenakshi Nagarajan, Ajith Harshana Ranabahu

Kno.e.sis Publications

In this paper, we present Twitris, a semantic Web application that facilitates browsing for news and information, using social perceptions as the fulcrum. In doing so we address challenges in large scale crawling, processing of real time information, and preserving spatio-temporal-thematic properties central to observations pertaining to real time events. We extract metadata about events from Twitter and bring related news and Wikipedia articles to the user. In developing Twitris, we have used the DBPedia ontology.

Adaptive Semantic Annotation Of Entity And Concept Mentions In Text, Pablo N. Mendes

Kno.e.sis Publications

The recent years have seen an increase in interest for knowledge repositories that are useful across applications, in contrast to the creation of ad hoc or application-specific databases.
These knowledge repositories figure as a central provider of unambiguous identifiers and semantic relationships between entities. As such, these shared entity descriptions serve as a common vocabulary to exchange and organize information in different formats and for different purposes. Therefore, there has been remarkable interest in systems that are able to automatically tag textual documents with identifiers from shared knowledge repositories so that the content in those documents is described in a …

Climate Change Beliefs, Concerns, And Attitudes Toward Adaptation And Mitigation Among Farmers In The Midwestern United States, J. Gordon Arbuckle, Linda Stalker Prokopy, Tonya Haigh, Jon Hobbs, Tricia Knoot, Cody Knutson, Adam Loy, Amber Saylor Mase, Jean Mcguire, Lois Wright Morton, John Tyndall, Melissa Widhalm

National Drought Mitigation Center: Faculty Publications

A February 2012 survey of almost 5,000 farmers across a region of the U.S. that produces more than half of the nation’s corn and soybean revealed that 66% of farmers believed climate change is occurring (8% mostly anthropogenic, 33% equally human and natural, 25% mostly natural), while 31% were uncertain and 3.5% did not believe that climate change is occurring. Results of initial analyses indicate that farmers’ beliefs about climate change and its causes vary considerably, and the relationships between those beliefs, concern about the potential impacts of climate change, and attitudes toward adaptive and mitigative action differ in systematic …

Augmented Realities And Uneven Geographies: Exploring The Geolinguistic Contours Of The Web, Mark Graham, Matthew Zook

Geography Faculty Publications

This paper analyzes the digital dimensions of places as represented by online, geocoded references to the economic, social, and political experiences of the city. These digital layers are invisible to the naked eye, but form a central component of the augmentations and mediations of place enabled by hundreds of millions of mobile computing devices and other digital technologies. The analysis highlights how these augmentations of place differ across space and language and highlights both the differences and some of the causal factors behind them. This is performed through a global study of all online content indexed within Google Maps, and …

Rfid, Gps, And 3g: Radio Wave Technologies And Privacy, Lori Bowen Ayre

Collaborative Librarianship

No abstract provided.

Technology Innovations In Publishing: New Directions In Academic And Cultural Communication., Elisabeth Tappeiner, Kate Lyons

Publications and Research

Over time, publishing technologies have not only influenced how people read, but also how knowledge is evaluated and authority is established. Social and mobile technologies represent relatively recent developments that have transformed the trade publishing world, but the extent to which they have affected academic publishing remains an open question. This article examines the rapid and disruptive transformations in the trade and digital publishing world, discusses how these developments have already intersected with the work of academics and considers how these changes might continue to transform the dissemination of academic research in the future.

Logical Linked Data Compression, Amit Krishna Joshi, Pascal Hitzler, Guozhu Dong

Computer Science and Engineering Faculty Publications

Linked data has experienced accelerated growth in recent years. With the continuing proliferation of structured data, demand for RDF compression is becoming increasingly important. In this study, we introduce a novel lossless compression technique for RDF datasets, called Rule Based Compression (RB Compression) that compresses datasets by generating a set of new logical rules from the dataset and removing triples that can be inferred from these rules. Unlike other compression techniques, our approach not only takes advantage of syntactic verbosity and data redundancy but also utilizes semantic associations present in the RDF graph. Depending on the nature of the dataset, …

Ecological Restoration's Genetic Culture: Participation And Technology In The Making Of Landscapes, Jairus Rossi

Theses and Dissertations--Geography

Practitioners of ecological restoration are increasingly adopting a genetic perspective when recreating historical landscapes. Genes are often endowed with the capacity to reveal specific and distinct relationships between organisms and environments. In this dissertation, I examine how genetic technologies and concepts are shaping ecological restoration practices. This research is based on two and a half years of fieldwork in Chicago. I employed participant observation and semi-structured interviews to compare how restorationists in two plant science institutions employ genetic concepts in their projects. One institution uses high-tech genetic methods to guide practice while the other uses lower-tech genetic approaches. Each group …

The Critical Role Of Mechanism-Based Models For Understanding And Predicting Liposomal Drug Loading, Binding And Release Kinetics, Sweta Modi

Theses and Dissertations--Pharmacy

Liposomal delivery systems hold considerable promise for improvement of cancer therapy provided that critical formulation design criteria can be met. The main objective of the current project was to enable quality by design in the formulation of liposomal delivery systems by developing comprehensive, mechanism-based mathematical models of drug loading, binding and release kinetics that take into account not only the therapeutic requirement but the physicochemical properties of the drug, the bilayer membrane, and the intraliposomal microenvironment.

Membrane binding of the drug affects both drug loading and release from liposomes. The influence of bilayer composition and phase structure on the partitioning …

Biodiversity Heritage Library, Smithsonian Institution Libraries, Deanna Marcum

Copyright, Fair Use, Scholarly Communication, etc.

The Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL), created in 2006, is the result of a collaboration of ten natural history museum and botanical garden libraries seeking to digitize core taxonomic literature and to make it free and openly available throughout the world. Today, the BHL includes fifteen member institutions whose efforts have shaped a collection of over 60,000 titles. It is supported through a combination of membership dues, in-kind support from member institutions, contributions from the user community, and direct support from the Smithsonian Institution Libraries, and it reaches tens of thousands of users each year. While managing the complex partnership has …

A Thermal Conversion Efficiency Study On Biomass Gasification Of Arundo Donax And Woodchips, Wei Wang

Masters Theses

The threat of energy depletion and greenhouse gas effect prove that fossil fuels are no longer sustainable for wide use. Thus, looking for alternative energy resources that are sustainable for use, environmentally friendly as well as regionally available is a challenge for current researchers. Biomass gasification is a process that turns solid biomass into combustible syn-gas. The identification of appropriate fuel sources for biomass gasification facilities in a particular region is significant from both energy and economic efficiency perspective.

This research developed three methods to calculate thermal conversion efficiency for biomass gasification using a downdraft laboratory scale gasification system. These …

Evaluating The Effectiveness Of The All Power Labs Power Pallet As A Training Tool For Biomass Gasification Education, Christopher Che Frederick

Masters Theses

The purpose of this study was to provide a better understanding of classroom training with regard to renewable energies. A lecture series and survey were developed by the principle researcher and presented to students in the Alternative and Renewable Energy Systems class and Machine Design class at Eastern Illinois University. The lecture series introduced students to biomass gasification and its application at Eastern Illinois University. The survey analyzed participant's level of knowledge of gasification technologies. The survey's pre and post test scores were used to validate the effectiveness of the training.

The All Power Labs Power Pallet was utilized as …

Student Perceptions Of Digital Storytelling As A Learning-Tool For Educational Leaders, Jason Lafrance, Jason Blizzard

Leadership, Technology & Human Development: Faculty Publications

: A study regarding students’ perceptions of digital storytelling as a learning tool was conducted in the fall of 2012. The population consisted of 12 students participating in an Administrative Theory course as part of their doctoral program in K-12 or higher education administration at a Carnegie Doctoral Research University in Georgia. During the eight-week course, students created digital stories that synthesized an autoethnography with leadership theory using Bolman and Deal’s (2011) four-framework approach to leadership. This allowed students to demonstrate the practice of continual reflection and assessment, a commitment to technology, diversity, and in-depth understanding of the knowledge and …

User Taglines: Alternative Presentations Of Expertise And Interest In Social Media, Hemant Purohit, Alex Dow, Omar Alonso, Lei Duan, Kevin Haas

Kno.e.sis Publications

Web applications are increasingly showing recommended users from social media along with some descriptions, an attempt to show relevancy - why they are being shown. For example, Twitter search for a topical keyword shows expert twitterers on the side for 'whom to follow'. Google+ and Facebook also recommend users to follow or add to friend circle. Popular Internet newspaper- The Huffington Post shows Twitter influencers/ experts on the side of an article for authoritative relevant tweets. The state of the art shows user profile bios as summary for Twitter experts, but it has issues with length constraint imposed by user …

Are Twitter Users Equal In Predicting Elections? A Study Of User Groups In Predicting 2012 U.S. Republican Primaries, Lu Chen, Wenbo Wang, Amit P. Sheth

Kno.e.sis Publications

Existing studies on predicting election results are under the assumption that all the users should be treated equally. However, recent work [14] shows that social media users from different groups (e.g., “silent majority” vs. “vocal minority”) have significant differences in the generated content and tweeting behavior. The effect of these differences on predicting election results has not been exploited yet. In this paper, we study the spectrum of Twitter users who participate in the on-line discussion of 2012 U.S. Republican Presidential Primaries, and examine the predictive power of different user groups (e.g., highly engaged users vs. lowly engaged users, right-leaning …