Brian A. Hickey

https://docs.rwu.edu/poetry-walk-images/1044/thumbnail.jp

In a Good Way

In the late 60’s/early 70’s I was a creative writing/philosophy student at RWC. I was exposed to what I still consider the best American poetry of the past 50 years: Wright, Merwin, Gluck, et. al. by my former professor Bob McRoberts who over the past 12 years (when I started writing again) has read and commented on well over 500 of my poems. Were it not for him you would not be reading this poem. Period

Social Media Influencers\u27 Impact on Purchasing Decisions

The study conducted entails how the usage of social media and the parasocial relationships with social media influencers impact the audience’s purchases as a consumer. The survey covers a wide range of questions discussing the different social media platforms, how often they engage on these platforms, and how often they click and engage with advertisements and influencers. It also covered questions that collected the demographics of the participants to give a better understanding of which groups are more likely to be influenced by advertisements and influencers. We have found that younger audiences are more likely to have their consumer purchases influenced by social media advertisements and influencers than older audiences. The results of the survey are discussed below

Collin Phelps

https://docs.rwu.edu/poetry-walk-images/1040/thumbnail.jp

AI as an accelerator for defining new problems that transcends boundaries

Interdisciplinary, transdisciplinary, convergence, and No-Boundary Thinking (NBT) research are methodology and technology-agnostic approaches to problem solving. The focus is on defining problems informed by access to multiple knowledge sources and expert perspectives across different domains, with the goal of accessing all available knowledge sources and perspectives. While access to all available knowledge sources and perspectives could be seen as a difficult to attain objective, with the recent rise of AI we might be closer to approaching this goal. We review several examples of methodologies and technologies that have been used to put these strategies into action, but the primary focus of this paper is on how recent advances in AI now enable a quantum leap forward in defining new problems. By leveraging the capacity of AI to synthesize knowledge from multiple domains, these tools can be used to propose multiple candidate problem definitions. AI is uniquely able to draw upon many more knowledge sources than any individual-or even a very large team-could. Coupled with human intelligence, better problems can be defined to address complex scholarly or societal challenges

Ctenophores are a highly impactful predatory guild in open oceanic ecosystems

The emergence of optical plankton sampling techniques has revealed that gelatinous zooplankton predators are considerably more numerous than previously observed.1,2 This recognition of the widespread presence of gelatinous zooplankton challenges our understanding of oceanic food-web dynamics because gelatinous zooplankton have traditionally been viewed as only minor players in oceanic biogeochemical cycles, which are critical in regulating atmospheric carbon dioxide.3,4,5,6,7,8 Ctenophores (commonly called comb jellies) can be numerically dominant predators in these gelatinous communities but are severely under-sampled due to their extremely delicate gelatinous bodies.9,10,11,12 To better understand their trophic impact, we used novel, non-invasive SCUBA techniques to document prey ingestion patterns of four widespread oceanic ctenophore species. We found that these ctenophores, on average, ingested 32 prey/h and up to 50 prey/h. At these rates, lobate and cestid ctenophores consume prey at similar rates to their highly impactful coastal relative, Mnemiopsis leidyi, and are likely the most impactful planktonic predator in the open oceans. Further, we showed that although major dietary components overlapped, different oceanic ctenophore species appear to consume different members of the plankton. Since these oceanic ctenophore species frequently co-occur, they comprise a powerful predatory guild with synergistic impacts. Consequently, epipelagic ctenophores have much greater trophic effects on material cycles over broad areas of the open ocean than previously considered

Noether symmetries of the minimal surface Lagrangian for Gödel-type spacetimes

We investigate the Noether symmetries of the minimal surface Lagrangian for four classes of metrics in Gödel-type spacetimes. Then, calculating the Noether symmetries for all classes, namely, classes I, II, III and IV, we determine the conserved fields corresponding to each class, allowing us to derive a comprehensive characterization of the minimal surface equations for Gödel-type spacetimes