Supporting Student Wellness: De-Stressing Initiatives at Memorial University Libraries

Student mental health and wellness is a critical issue facing institutions of higher education across Canada. Mental illness is predicted to be the leading cause of disability at Canadian universities. This article looks at recent data on how mental health issues such as stress, anxiety, and depression are affecting academic performance. There is a growing consensus amongst university administrators that student mental health is a campus-wide responsibility. Providing students with healthy and positive methods of relaxing and coping with stress is another way that libraries can support learning and academic success and contribute to a campus culture that is supportive of wellness. Two branches of Memorial University Libraries in Newfoundland, the Queen Elizabeth II (QEII) and Grenfell Campus library, have undertaken initiatives, partially through partnering with the university’s Student Services department, to help decrease students’ anxiety levels during the particularly stressful end of semester. These include extended hours, yoga and mindfulness, pet therapy, micro-breaks, and free hot beverages and snacks. Both branches surveyed students to obtain feedback on these initiatives and determine what impact students felt the initiatives had on their stress levels. These events also garnered positive exposure in both social and local media and provided a great promotional opportunity for the libraries

Interview with Mark Guzdial, Georgia Institute of Technology: Computing as Creation

The article of record as published may be located at http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2576891.2576892Mark Guzdial is a Professor in the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech). His research focuses on the intersection of computing and education, from the role of computing in facilitating education to how we educate about computing. In this interview with him, he discusses how we teach computing and to whom, especially his contention that a contextualized approach is a powerful tool to teach everyone about computing

From Service to Synergy: Embedding Librarians in a Digital Humanities Project

Definitions of the term digital humanities vary, and its place in the academic library is still being explored. Yet exploration is indeed taking place, at large research institutions as well as, increasingly, at smaller colleges and undergraduate libraries. This article details an innovative digital humanities project carried out at an institution of 2,300 undergraduates, where a creative institutional partnership was the key to its success. The project has provided an outstanding opportunity to address the ACRL Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education, while embracing the growing trend on many campuses to showcase student research

Tracking Criminals on Facebook: A Case Study From A Digital Forensics REU Program

The 2014 Digital Forensics Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) Program at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) focused its summer efforts on tracking criminal forums and Facebook groups. The UAB-REU Facebook team was provided with a list of about 60 known criminal groups on Facebook, with a goal to track illegal information posted in these groups and ultimately store the information in a searchable database for use by digital forensic analysts. Over the course of about eight weeks, the UAB-REU Facebook team created a database with over 400 Facebook groups conducting criminal activity along with over 100,000 unique users within these groups. As of November 2014, students involved in the research project with Advisor Gary Warner at UAB continued running the automated fetchers since my summer projected completed. Working with U.S. Federal Law Enforcement agencies, there have been at least NINE CONFIRMED ARRESTS of individuals associated with the illegal activities tracked on Facebook. This paper will discuss the methods used to collect the information, store it in a database and analyze the data. The paper will also present possible future uses of the Facebook criminal activity-monitoring tool. Keywords: social media, criminal organizations, online crime, social network monitorin

A View from Elsewhere

This report provides an overview of activities carried out during Michaelmas Term, Autumn 2009, as part of a Cambridge University Library Arcadia Project Fellowship on "Rapid Innovation in the Library". The approach taken during the project was to look for opportunities for "quick wins" in the current library setting that could be used to illustrate potential (and tangible) benefits from engaging with current and emerging technologies and changing trends in user behaviour. Where possible, the work built on work undertaken as part of the previous Arcadia projects.The Arcadia Programme has been funded by a generous grant from the Arcadia Fund. http://www.arcadiafund.org.uk

Thinking with data visualisations: cognitive processing and spatial inferences when communicating climate change

Data visualisations can be effective for communicating scientific data, but only if they are understood. Such visualisations (i.e. scientific figures) are used within assessment reports produced by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). However, IPCC figures have been criticised for being inaccessible to non-experts. This thesis presents a thematic analysis of interviews with IPCC authors, finding that a requirement to uphold scientific accuracy results in complex figures that are difficult for non-experts to comprehend, and which therefore require expert explanation. Evidence is subsequently presented showing that figures with greater visual complexity are associated with greater perceived comprehension difficulty among non-experts. Comprehension of complex data visualisations may require readers to make spatial inferences. When interpreting a time-series graph of climate data, it was found that non-experts did not always readily identify the long-term trend. Two experiments then show that linguistic information in the form of warnings can support spatial representations for trends in memory by directing visual attention during encoding (measured using eyetracking). This thesis also considers spatial inferences when forming expectations about future data, finding that expectations were sensitive to patterns in past data. Further, features that act on bottom-up perceptual processes were largely ineffective in supporting spatial inferences. Conversely, replacing spatial inferences by explicitly representing information moderated future expectations. However, replacing spatial inferences might not always be desirable in real-world contexts. The evidence indicates that when information is not explicitly represented in a data visualisation, providing top-down knowledge may be more effective in supporting spatial inferences than providing visual cues acting on bottom-up perceptual processes. This thesis further provides evidence-based guidelines drawn from the cognitive and psychological sciences to support climate change researchers in enhancing the ease of comprehension of their data visualisations, and so enable future IPCC outputs to be more accessible

The Official Student Newspaper of UAS

Editorial / Whalesong Staff -- Letters to the Editor -- Holiday Expectations -- Perseverance Theatre's Hold These Truths -- Legislators Look at Finance / The Symposium Continued -- UAS In Brief -- UAS Community Thanksgiving --A Time to Remember: The Christmas Truces -- School of Ed. Future Uncertain -- Fantastic Beasts, Unimaginative Writing -- Calendar and Comics

Connecting Incoming Freshmen With Engineering Through Hands-On Projects

Engineering programs suffer a high attrition rate, which causes the nation to graduate much less engineers. A survey of the literature reveals that the high attrition rate is due mainly to the fact that the first year of an engineering program is all fundamental theory and students don't see the connection to their future engineering careers. To address this problem, educators in the Roy G. Perry College of Engineering at Prairie View A&M University launched a five-week summer camp entitled “College of Engineering Enhancement Institute (CE2I)” aimed at improving the performance of incoming freshmen in mathematics by one level and a smoother transition between high school and college. Each department in the college participated by introducing their individual curriculum through hands-on projects designed by faculty members. Computer Engineering, Computer Science and Computer Engineering Technology programs implemented multimedia projects to tie the incoming freshman to their selected majors. Results show that the camp met the expectations and successfully points the directions for our future engineering education practices.