Communicating Prevention: The Effects of the keepin' it REAL Classroom Videotapes and Televised PSAs on Middle-School Students' Substance Use

This study sought to determine if exposure to two communication-oriented activities, videotapes and public service announcements, accounts for changes in substance use among adolescents participating in the Drug Resistance Strategies Project's keepin' it REAL adolescent substance use prevention curriculum. Middle-school students (4,734, 72% Latino) responded to questionnaires related to these analyses. An analysis of covariance (ANCOVA) model was fit separately to six substance use outcomes. The results suggested that intervention students who saw four or five videos engaged in less substance use in the past month than did students who saw fewer videos. Having seen the PSAs one or more times did not predict the reported change in substance use.     

Quality and relevance of domain-specific search: A case study in mental health

When searching for health information, results quality can be judged against available scientific evidence: Do search engines return advice consistent with evidence based medicine? We compared the performance of domain-specific health and depression search engines against a general-purpose engine (Google) on both relevance of results and quality of advice. Over 101 queries, to which the term ‘depression’ was added if not already present, Google returned more relevant results than those of the domain-specific engines. However, over the 50 treatment-related queries, Google returned 70 pages recommending for or against a well studied treatment, of which 19 strongly disagreed with the scientific evidence. A domain-specific index of 4 sites selected by domain experts was only wrong in 5 of 50 recommendations. Analysis suggests a tension between relevance and quality. Indexing more pages can give a greater number of relevant results, but selective inclusion can give better quality.     

Another Look at What Moves Public Opinion: Media Agenda Setting and Polls in the 2000 U.S. Election

This study examined two levels of media agenda effects on aggregatepublic opinion from different news sources. The effects wereinvestigated immediately and cumulatively. Content analysisdata from the 2000 U.S. presidential election coverage by fournational news organizations were related to the Gallup pre-electionpoll standings of each candidate. Regression analyses foundthat both the salience of a candidate and the salience of theattributes of a candidate cumulatively, but not immediately,influenced his standing in the polls. An analysis of news sourcessupported the finding that the two levels of agenda-settingeffects seemed mostly cumulative rather than immediate. Newsfrom different sources, however, tended to have effects of differentdegrees and sometimes different directions on candidate pollstandings. Cumulative effects of candidate salience on aggregateopinion change were found for non-partisan and neutral newssources—reporters, poll reporting and public documents—whereasthe effects of candidate attribute salience mostly came frompartisan sources—the candidate himself and members ofthe competing political party. Possible political implicationsof these findings are discussed.     

Demonstrating Library Impact Through Acknowledgment: An Examination of Acknowledgments in Theses and Dissertations

Academic libraries are increasingly seeking ways to demonstrate their impact on student learning. Acknowledgments - formal statements of indebtedness – in graduate theses and dissertations provide a rather unexplored area for demonstrating impact of the academic library on student learning. This study uses quantitative and qualitative methods to characterize acknowledgments of the Texas A&M University Libraries (TAMU Libraries) in theses and dissertations, both overall and for three disciplines specifically: civil engineering, geography, and history. This study also searched for mentions of the TAMU Libraries throughout the entire body of theses and dissertations. Overall, acknowledgments to the TAMU Libraries in theses and dissertations were less than 1%, though acknowledgments were found in all three disciplines with over a quarter of the history theses and dissertations containing an acknowledgment to libraries. There was no statistically significant difference found between the numbers of acknowledgments in theses versus dissertations. Acknowledgments to the TAMU Libraries were found in the theses and dissertations of 28 different departments. Mentions to the TAMU Libraries – not necessarily a formal acknowledgment – were found throughout the text of theses and dissertations with most concentrated in the acknowledgment, method, and bibliography sections.     

Social Comparisons and Need Fulfillment: Interpreting Video Game Enjoyment in the Context of Leaderboards

This study examines how social comparison information provided by video game leaderboards may influence players’ retrospective judgments of autonomy, competence, and relatedness need fulfillment. Participants played a video game and were randomly assigned to receive no postgame feedback or were shown a leaderboard that placed them in the top or bottom quartile of players. Results indicate downward social comparisons increase enjoyment by increasing competence and relatedness perceptions. However, upward comparisons did not have an opposite effect, nor did either type of social comparison influence players’ autonomy perceptions. Implications for applying Self-Determination Theory to video game enjoyment in the context of social comparison feedback is discussed.     

Retrieving and classifying instances of source code plagiarism

Automatic detection of source code plagiarism is an important research field for both the commercial software industry and within the research community. Existing methods of plagiarism detection primarily involve exhaustive pairwise document comparison, which does not scale well for large software collections. To achieve scalability, we approach the problem from an information retrieval (IR) perspective. We retrieve a ranked list of candidate documents in response to a pseudo-query representation constructed from each source code document in the collection. The challenge in source code document retrieval is that the standard bag-of-words (BoW) representation model for such documents is likely to result in many false positives being retrieved, because of the use of identical programming language specific constructs and keywords. To address this problem, we make use of an abstract syntax tree (AST) representation of the source code documents. While the IR approach is efficient, it is essentially unsupervised in nature. To further improve its effectiveness, we apply a supervised classifier (pre-trained with features extracted from sample plagiarized source code pairs) on the top ranked retrieved documents. We report experiments on the SOCO-2014 dataset comprising 12K Java source files with almost 1M lines of code. Our experiments confirm that the AST based approach produces significantly better retrieval effectiveness than a standard BoW representation, i.e., the AST based approach is able to identify a higher number of plagiarized source code documents at top ranks in response to a query source code document. The supervised classifier, trained on features extracted from sample plagiarized source code pairs, is shown to effectively filter and thus further improve the ranked list of retrieved candidate plagiarized documents.     

Susceptibility to Deception in a Political News Interview: Effects of Identification,Perceived Cooperativeness,and Ingroup Vulnerability

This article explores people’s susceptibility to political deception. Participants watched a news interview in which a politician either answered all the questions or deceptively evaded a question. In Study 1 (n = 202), deception is perceived through the dodge being irrelevant for voters who do not identify with the politician. In Study 2 (n = 618), partisan voters consider the politician more deceptive, and acting more deceptively, when the politician has their opposing party affiliation, independent of whether he dodges. When the politician shares their party identification, voters identify with the politician more and consider his responses more relevant. Findings are consistent with theoretical positions of identification, the cooperative principle, and social identity.     

Technological research in the EU is less efficient than the world average. EU research policy risks Europeans’ future

We have studied the efficiency of research in the EU by a percentile-based citation approach that analyzes the distribution of country papers among the world papers. Going up in the citation scale, the frequency of papers from efficient countries increases while the frequency from inefficient countries decreases. In the percentile-based approach, this trend, which is uniform at any citation level, is measured by the e_p index that equals the P_{top 1%}/P_{top 10%} ratio. By using the e_p index we demonstrate that EU research on fast-evolving technological topics is less efficient than the world average and that the EU is far from being able to compete with the most advanced countries. The e_p index also shows that the USA is well ahead of the EU in both fast- and slow-evolving technologies, which suggests that the advantage of the USA over the EU in innovation is due to low research efficiency in the EU. In accord with some previous studies, our results show that the European Commission’s ongoing claims about the excellence of EU research are based on a wrong diagnosis. The EU must focus its research policy on the improvement of its inefficient research. Otherwise, the future of Europeans is at risk.     

ACADEMIC SELF‐EFFICACY AMONG JUNIOR HIGH SCHOOL STUDENTS IN GHANA: EVALUATING FACTOR STRUCTURE AND MEASUREMENT INVARIANCE ACROSS GENDER

Self‐efficacy is a universal construct, but few validated measures exist for researchers in developing countries to use in assessing youths’ perceptions of their ability to achieve academic success. This study examined the cross‐cultural suitability and psychometric properties of an academic self‐efficacy scale (ASES) adapted for the Ghanaian context. ASES construct validity was assessed with a sample of 4,289 Ghanaian junior high‐school students and exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis. Invariance testing assessed the scale's measurement equivalence by gender and temporal stability of gender equivalence. The ASES is a valid, reliable one‐dimensional scale for assessing young Ghanaians’ perceptions of their academic capabilities, and it works equally well across genders. As adapted, ASES is a valid scale with utility for researchers examining predictors and effects of academic self‐efficacy. The ASES has important implications for decisions regarding investment in programs aimed at improving academic self‐efficacy of youth, both in sub‐Saharan Africa and the increasingly diverse American public schools.