Controversial Rap Themes,Gender Portrayals and Skin Tone Distortion: A Content Analysis of Rap Music Videos

A content analysis of rap music videos aired on BET, MTV, and VH1 examined the occurrence of controversial themes, gender differences, and skin tone distortion. The results of this study found that current rap music videos have placed an emphasis on themes of materialism and misogyny. Additionally, men and women in the videos differ in their portrayal of these themes. Specifically, female characters are significantly more likely to appear as objects of sexuality. Men and women also differ in their appearance with more African American females appearing to have Eurocentric features. Implications and suggestions for future research are discussed.     

Neural Semantic Personalized Ranking for item cold-start recommendation

Recommender systems help users deal with information overload and enjoy a personalized experience on the Web. One of the main challenges in these systems is the item cold-start problem which is very common in practice since modern online platforms have thousands of new items published every day. Furthermore, in many real-world scenarios, the item recommendation tasks are based on users’ implicit preference feedback such as whether a user has interacted with an item. To address the above challenges, we propose a probabilistic modeling approach called Neural Semantic Personalized Ranking (NSPR) to unify the strengths of deep neural network and pairwise learning. Specifically, NSPR tightly couples a latent factor model with a deep neural network to learn a robust feature representation from both implicit feedback and item content, consequently allowing our model to generalize to unseen items. We demonstrate NSPR’s versatility to integrate various pairwise probability functions and propose two variants based on the Logistic and Probit functions. We conduct a comprehensive set of experiments on two real-world public datasets and demonstrate that NSPR significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art baselines.     

Full Steam Ahead: A Conceptual Analysis of User-Supplied Tags on Steam

This article describes a conceptual analysis of user-generated tags applied to video games in the Steam video game distribution system. The research team scraped all user-generated tags available on Steam and then conducted a conceptual analysis of the tags, sorting them into categories and comparing them to the current version of the Video Game Metadata Schema. This analysis allowed the team to identify new metadata elements and terms useful to game players. We present a discussion covering the major issues in organizing the terms, as well as the implications for the future work in the area of video game metadata.     

A Student-Choice Model to Address Diverse Needs and Promote Active Learning

Journal of Science Education and Technology - A student-choice model course redesign was used to counteract a large increase in student enrollment, improve the quality of instruction, and preserve...     

Assessing working memory capacity in a non-native language

The present studies directly test the usefulness of two English-language working memory capacity (WMC) assessments with two samples of students whose native language was not English. Participants completed two widely used complex span tasks, Reading Span (RSpan) and Operation Span (OSpan), in English. To determine whether the well-established relationship between WMC and Raven's Advanced Progressive Matrices (RAPM) would be observed when span tasks were not given in the native language of the participant, span scores were regressed against performance on the RAPM. Results indicated that while OSpan was a reliable and valid predictor of RAPM in non-native-English speakers, RSpan administered in English was not.     

Acute effects of static stretching on characteristics of the isokinetic angle - torque relationship, surface electromyography, and mechanomyography

The aims of this study were to examine the acute effects of static stretching on peak torque, work, the joint angle at peak torque, acceleration time, isokinetic range of motion, mechanomyographic amplitude, and electromyographic amplitude of the rectus femoris during maximal concentric isokinetic leg extensions at 1.04 and 5.23 rad x s(-1) in men and women. Ten women (mean +/- s: age 23.0 +/- 2.9 years, stature 1.61 +/- 0.12 m, mass 63.3 +/- 9.9 kg) and eight men (age 21.4 +/- 3.0 years, stature 1.83 +/- 0.11 m, mass 83.1 +/- 15.2 kg) performed maximal voluntary concentric isokinetic leg extensions at 1.04 and 5.23 rad x s(-1). Following the initial isokinetic tests, the dominant leg extensors were stretched using four static stretching exercises. After the stretching, the isokinetic tests were repeated. Peak torque, acceleration time, and electromyographic amplitude decreased (P< or = 0.05) from pre- to post-stretching at 1.04 and 5.23 rad . s(-1); there were no changes (P > 0.05) in work, joint angle at peak torque, isokinetic range of motion, or mechanomyographic amplitude. These findings indicate no stretching-related changes in the area under the angle - torque curve (work), but a significant decrease in peak torque, which suggests that static stretching may cause a "flattening" of the angle - torque curve that reduces peak strength but allows for greater force production at other joint angles. These findings, in conjunction with the increased limb acceleration rates (decreased acceleration time) observed in the present study, provide tentative support for the hypothesis that static stretching alters the angle - torque relationship and/or sarcomere shortening velocity.