Power Up: Exploring Gaming in LIS Curricula

Given their educational potential, increasing accessibility, and growing, diverse user base, games are fast becoming integral parts of library collections and programming. Previous research has found that few ALA-accredited programs offer courses specifically on gaming in libraries, potentially leaving pre-service librarians unprepared to implement games in their libraries. This research study will survey LIS educators to identify factors that promote or inhibit the inclusion or exclusion of content related to games and gaming in their courses and curricula. The findings will be used to provide recommendations for curricula and best practices to better prepare LIS educators and, ultimately, pre-service librarians to engage with games and other new interactive media as part of the transforming universe of LIS education

Gaussian Adaptive Attention is All You Need: Robust Contextual Representations Across Multiple Modalities

We propose the Multi-Head Gaussian Adaptive Attention Mechanism (GAAM), a novel probabilistic attention framework, and the Gaussian Adaptive Transformer (GAT), designed to enhance information aggregation across multiple modalities, including Speech, Text and Vision. GAAM integrates learnable mean and variance into its attention mechanism, implemented in a Multi-Headed framework enabling it to collectively model any Probability Distribution for dynamic recalibration of feature significance. This method demonstrates significant improvements, especially with highly non-stationary data, surpassing the state-of-the-art attention techniques in model performance (up to approximately +20% in accuracy) by identifying key elements within the feature space. GAAM's compatibility with dot-product-based attention models and relatively low number of parameters showcases its adaptability and potential to boost existing attention frameworks. Empirically, GAAM exhibits superior adaptability and efficacy across a diverse range of tasks, including emotion recognition in speech, image classification, and text classification, thereby establishing its robustness and versatility in handling multi-modal data. Furthermore, we introduce the Importance Factor (IF), a new learning-based metric that enhances the explainability of models trained with GAAM-based methods. Overall, GAAM represents an advancement towards development of better performing and more explainable attention models across multiple modalities

Bioassay Guided Fractionation and Structural Elucidation of Environmental Attractants for Juvenile European Carp (Cyprinus carpio)

Pheromones, semiochemicals that trigger a natural response in a second member of the same species, have been extensively investigated across a variety of vertebrates and invertebrates to manipulate their behaviour. In aquatic species, these pheromones play important roles in larval settlement and metamorphosis, courtship and mating, and foraging. Pheromones responsible for the initiation of mating behaviour in carp and goldfish have been investigated extensively in sexually mature carp but there has been limited investigation on the role the environment plays on behaviour. The introduction of environmental stimuli was investigated to test the hypothesis that environmental cues can be used, like pheromones, to manipulate carp behaviour. Ceratophyllum demersum and Myriophyllum spicatum, a native and invasive aquatic macrophyte, were placed in bioassay tanks with sexually mature carp and spawning incidences recorded across a 15 min monitoring period. A clear preference for the invasive M. spicatum over the native C. demersum was observed even in the presence of yarn used as control. Crude extracts of each plant were tested using yarn as the spawning substrate with similar observations made removing the impact of the physical characteristics to the observed preference. Crude extracts of seven aquatic macrophytes collected from wetlands around Victoria where carp aggregations have been observed (Myriophyllum aquaticum, Egeria densa, Potamogeton crispus. Vallisneria australis, Cabomba caroliniana, Potamogeton sulcatus, and Chara australis) were used in behavioural bioassays mimicking those used for spawning activity to determine if juvenile carp exhibit a behavioural modification in the presence of one of these species. M. aquaticum exhibited the most significant and consistent change to preference and was selected for isolation and purification of potential attractants. In total twelve compounds were isolated and structurally identified using 1D and 2D NMR, mass spectrometry and optical rotation data. Each compound was assessed to determine the preference of juvenile carp. Eight of the twelve compounds tested resulted in a positive behavioural change and provides strong evidence that compounds derived from aquatic flora can potentially be used to manipulate carp behaviour. A final study looking at water collected from known carp aggregation hot spots at Lake Sorell in Tasmania and the Banrock Station wetlands in South Australia was conducted to see if leachates, from the surrounding environment or plants in the water, can result in similar observations. Water collected from the Silver Plains marsh at lake Sorell and the wetland outlet at Banrock station resulted in the most substantial change in carp behaviour. This observation was supported by tracking data of radio-tagged carp obtained during the periods of water collection. While no compounds were able to be successfully isolated from these samples there is potential for future work using water from the wetlands to manipulate carp behaviour. The potential to use environmental attractants to manipulate carp preferences to controlled aggregation sites, or for juvenile aggregation prior to reaching sexual maturity will contribute as part of a broad pest management program assisting in the eradication of carp in our waterways

Don’t Want to Get Caught? Don’t Say It: The Use of EMOJIS in Online Human Sex Trafficking Ads

Technology has dramatically changed the way criminals conduct their illicit activities. Specifically, the Internet has become a major facilitator of online human sex trafficking. Traffickers are using these technologies to market their victims which presents new challenges for efforts to combat sex trafficking. This study used knowledge management principles and natural language processing methods to develop an improved ontology of online sex trafficking ads. The language of these ads is constantly evolving; therefore, this study explored the role of a new type of indicator, emoticons, to the ontology of human trafficking indicators

A Systems Approach to Countermeasures in Credibility Assessment Interviews

Countermeasures, or techniques for hiding guilt during a credibility assessment examination, have long been an important topic in cognitive psychology and criminal justice fields. With recent IS research on automated screening systems, understanding the potential for countermeasures in this new paradigm is of increasing importance. This paper reports on a large experiment examining countermeasures in an automated deception detection screening context. The effectiveness of traditional countermeasure types (mental and physical) are examined, as well as an exploratory approach of trying several countermeasures at once. The exploratory approach was tested to investigate a proposed novel systems-inspired solution to countermeasures—triangulating on deception likelihood using multiple sensors measuring multiple behavioral and psychophysiological anomalies. The findings give credence to the proposition that monitoring multiple heterogeneous cues to deception may be a viable solution for mitigating the effectiveness of countermeasures

A Knowledge Management Approach to Identify Victims of Human Sex Trafficking

Social media and the interactive Web have enabled human traffickers to lure victims and then sell them faster and in greater safety than ever before. However, these same tools have also enabled investigators in their search for victims and criminals. We used system development action research methodology to create and apply a prototype designed to identify victims of human sex trafficking by analyzing online ads. The prototype used a knowledge management approach of generating actionable intelligence by applying a set of strong filters based on an ontology to identify potential victims. We used the prototype to analyze a data set generated from online ads. We used the results of this process to generate a revised prototype that included the use of machine learning and text mining enhancements. We used the revised prototype to identify potential victims in a second data set. The results of applying the prototypes suggest a viable approach to identifying victims of human sex trafficking in online ads

Actionable Intelligence-Oriented Cyber Threat Modeling Framework

Amid the growing challenges of cybersecurity, the new paradigm of cyber threat intelligence (or CTI) has gained momentum to better deal with cyber threats. There, however, has been one fundamental and very practical problem of information overload organizations face in constructing an effective CTI program. We developed a cyber threat intelligence prototype that automatically and dynamically performs the correlation of business assets, vulnerabilities, and cyber threat information in a scoped setting to remediate the challenge of information overload. Conveniently called TIME (for Threat Intelligence Modeling Environment), it repeats the cycle of: (1) collect internal asset data; (2) gather vulnerability and threat data; (3) correlate vulnerabilities with assets; and (4) derive CTI and alerts significant internal asset-related vulnerabilities in a timely manner. For this, it takes advantage of CTI reports produced by online sites and several NIST standards intended to formalize vulnerability and threat management

Treating a Viral Culture: Using Cultural Competency and Social Informatics to Design Contextualized Information Literacy Efforts for Specific Social Information Cultures

This chapter proposes a novel theoretical framework, Social Information Cultural Competency (SICC), that may be used for designing contextualized information literacy efforts. The SICC approach leverages the frameworks of social informatics, cultural competency, and psychosocial understandings of information behavior to encourage information professionals to develop more nuanced understandings of specific social information cultures. After defining this approach, the chapter then applies the SICC framework to a case study considering information literacy interventions addressing a social information culture engaged in sharing COVID-19 misinformation through social media. As part of this case study, the chapter discusses three current information literacy approaches to COVID-19 online misinformation interventions: inoculation or “prebunking” efforts, accuracy prompts before posting or sharing, and online conversation groups. Finally, the SICC framework is compared with each of the three current approaches. The chapter concludes with implications of this novel framework for current and future information literacy efforts aimed at combatting dis/misinformation within social information cultures

Antibiotic susceptibilities of Pseudomonas aeruginosa isolates derived from patients with cystic fibrosis under aerobic, anaerobic, and biofilm conditions

Recent studies have determined that Pseudomonas aeruginosa can live in a biofilm mode within hypoxic mucus in the airways of patients with cystic fibrosis (CF). P. aeruginosa grown under anaerobic and biofilm conditions may better approximate in vivo growth conditions in the CF airways, and combination antibiotic susceptibility testing of anaerobically and biofilm-grown isolates may be more relevant than traditional susceptibility testing under planktonic aerobic conditions. We tested 16 multidrug-resistant isolates of P. aeruginosa derived from CF patients using multiple combination bactericidal testing to compare the efficacies of double and triple antibiotic combinations against the isolates grown under traditional aerobic planktonic conditions, in planktonic anaerobic conditions, and in biofilm mode. Both anaerobically grown and biofilm-grown bacteria were significantly less susceptible (P < 0.01) to single and combination antibiotics than corresponding aerobic planktonically grown isolates. Furthermore, the antibiotic combinations that were bactericidal under anaerobic conditions were often different from those that were bactericidal against the same organisms grown as biofilms. The most effective combinations under all conditions were colistin (tested at concentrations suitable for nebulization) either alone or in combination with tobramycin (10 mu g ml(-1)), followed by meropenem combined with tobramycin or ciprofloxacin. The findings of this study illustrate that antibiotic sensitivities are dependent on culture conditions and highlight the complexities of choosing appropriate combination therapy for multidrug-resistant P. aeruginosa in the CF lung