3D visualisation and artistic imagery to enhance interest in ‘hidden environments’ – new approaches to soil science

Interactive Virtual Environments (VEs) have the potential to increase student interest in soil science. Accordingly a bespoke ‘soil atlas’ was created using Java3D as an interactive 3D VE, to show soil information in the context of (and as affected by) the over-lying landscape. To display the below-ground soil characteristics, four sets of artistic illustrations were produced, each set showing the effects of soil organic-matter density and water content on fungal density, to determine potential for visualisations and interactivity in stimulating interest in soil and soil illustrations, interest being an important factor in facilitating learning. The illustrations were created using 3D modelling packages, and a wide range of styles were produced. This allowed a preliminary study of the relative merits of different artistic styles, scientific-credibility, scale, abstraction and ‘realism’ (e.g. photo-realism or realism of forms), and any relationship between these and the level of interest indicated by the study participants in the soil visualisations and VE. The study found significant differences in mean interest ratings for different soil illustration styles, as well as in the perception of scientific-credibility of these styles, albeit for both measures there was considerable difference of attitude between participants about particular styles. There was also found to be a highly significant positive correlation between participants rating styles highly for interest and highly for scientific-credibility. There was furthermore a particularly high interest rating among participants for seeing temporal soil processes illustrated/animated, suggesting this as a particularly promising method for further stimulating interest in soil illustrations and soil itself.     

Integration of Study Abroad with Social Media Technologies and Decision‐Making Applications

This article describes the design and delivery of a program, “Global Business in a Digital World.” The program integrates the use of social media technologies and business applications in a series of courses that include short‐term study abroad components that focus on emerging markets. The objectives are to: (1) provide additional options for study abroad; (2) broaden the scope of the international business program to include more emphasis on emerging markets; (3) provide integration across business and liberal arts; and (4) integrate social media technologies into the study abroad experience. To achieve these objectives, students study business in the host country, interact with local company executives, and experiment with social media and related technologies. A conceptual framework describes the course structure and its relationship with the four categories of social media classified as 4Cs: Communication, Connection, Cooperation, and Collaboration ( Cook, 2008 ; Enterprise 2.0. Burlington, VT: Gower Publishing Limited). Conclusions reveal improved student learning outcomes after exposure to the study abroad, but also suggest the study abroad experience requires specific skill development. A research framework gives direction for future work.     

The St Francis mission Indians and the National Interscholastic Catholic basketball tournament, 1924–1941

Organizers of the National Interscholastic Catholic Basketball Tournament in Chicago consistently extended bids to a tribal team from St Francis Mission during the 1920s and 1930s. The authors argue that they did so because putting a ‘real’ Indian team on the court drew crowds that helped the tournament compete with a rival ‘anti-Catholic’ public school tourney at the University of Chicago. Jesuit educators at St Francis and the tribal athletes agreed to take part for other reasons, the Jesuits hoping to advance their mission goals and the players finding an opportunity to excel at a game they loved. The team's triumphs on the court thus involved them in political, interuniversity and cultural battles being waged by others off the court.     

The Reliability of the [Vdot]O2-HR Relation during Graded Treadmill Exercise in Prepubertal Boys and Adult Men

Abstract

When subjects make simultaneous aiming movements of the upper limbs over different distances, assimilation effects are shown; the shorter distance limb overshoots when paired with a longer distance limb. However, it is not known whether assimilation effects are due to variations in distance per se or to variations in target location. To separate the possible influences of distance and location, 60 subjects made rapid bimanual aiming movements in one of four conditions. The two different-distance groups made a 20° movement in the left hand and a 60° movement in the right hand to either the same or different target locations. The comparison groups moved 20° in each limb. Somewhat surprisingly, spatial assimilations were greater when moving different distances to the same, rather than different, target locations, which suggests interlimb differences in distance mediate assimilation effects rather than target location. Temporal assimilations were greater when distance and location were varied, but the assimilations were not related to interlimb differences in velocity, as predicted by Marteniuk and MacKenzie (1980).     

Improving search via personalized query expansion using social media

Social tagging systems have gained increasing popularity as a method of annotating and categorizing a wide range of different web resources. Web search that utilizes social tagging data suffers from an extreme example of the vocabulary mismatch problem encountered in traditional information retrieval (IR). This is due to the personalized, unrestricted vocabulary that users choose to describe and tag each resource. Previous research has proposed the utilization of query expansion to deal with search in this rather complicated space. However, non-personalized approaches based on relevance feedback and personalized approaches based on co-occurrence statistics only showed limited improvements. This paper proposes a novel query expansion framework based on individual user profiles mined from the annotations and resources the user has marked. The underlying theory is to regularize the smoothness of word associations over a connected graph using a regularizer function on terms extracted from top-ranked documents. The intuition behind the model is the prior assumption of term consistency: the most appropriate expansion terms for a query are likely to be associated with, and influenced by terms extracted from the documents ranked highly for the initial query. The framework also simultaneously incorporates annotations and web documents through a Tag-Topic model in a latent graph. The experimental results suggest that the proposed personalized query expansion method can produce better results than both the classical non-personalized search approach and other personalized query expansion methods. Hence, the proposed approach significantly benefits personalized web search by leveraging users’ social media data.     

Should I Stay or Go?: Student Identity Gaps,Feelings, and Intent to Leave

This study examined gaps between students’ personal, enacted, relational, and communal identities. The particular interest was students’ intentions to leave the university as a function of their identity gaps, self-esteem, communication satisfaction, motivation, and general affect. Participants (N = 209 undergraduate students) completed self-report measures while reflecting on their communication with others at the university (e.g., faculty, staff, and peers). Results of path analysis models indicated that personal-communal identity gaps are predictive of students’ communication satisfaction, motivation, general affect, and their intentions to leave the university. This predictive ability is enhanced by the presence of personal-relational gaps.     

The Music Industry

After finding that factor analysis is used extensively in the journal of Broadcasting &; Electronic Media, and further finding that there is little consistency to how the analysis is used, this article proposes some standards which authors ought to consider when using factor analysis, especially releasing the limits on the number of factors in exploratory analysis, and using structural models for confirmatory analysis.