Richtags: Cross Repository Browsing

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Provider Opinion: Should We Screen and Counsel Parents of Teen Drivers Regarding Texting/Distracted Driving?

Adolescent texting and driving has been directly responsible for the deaths of 11 teenagers every day. 33% of teenagers in Vermont admit to texting and driving making it one of the most prevalent risky behaviors in their age group. Currently there is no routine screening recommendation for parents with adolescent drivers addressing texting and driving. Mobile application information can improve parental monitoring and prevent texting and driving habits from forming in adolescents.https://scholarworks.uvm.edu/fmclerk/1384/thumbnail.jp

Student Anxiety in the Foreign Language Classroom: A Qualitative Phenomenological Study

The purpose of this hermeneutic phenomenological study was to understand the lived experiences of foreign language anxiety or xenoglossophobia, for college students enrolled in foreign language courses at The Southern University. The topic was guided by Krashen’s theory of second language acquisition, as it relates to many aspects of the actual process of second language learning. The sample consisted of 10 college students enrolled in foreign language courses at the university level. Qualitative data collection occurred through semi-structured interviews, journaling, and document collection. Data analysis procedures were derived from methods set forth by Van Kaam, and modified by Moustakas, including horizonalization, delimiting horizons, organizing consistent qualities and themes, and constructing textural descriptions. Member checks, audits, and a codebook were used to ensure the trustworthiness and validity of the study. From the data, themes of outlook, goals, and structure emerged. The findings led to the conclusion that participants\u27 perceptions, goals, relationships, and structure impacted their perceptions of xenoglossophobia, whether positive or negative. Recommendations for future research were provided, as future studies would prove beneficial to shed more light on xenoglossophobia

The effect of air pollution and time spent outdoors on pulmonary function in a diverse New England population

Outdoor air pollution has been associated with declines in pulmonary function. We collected daily pulmonary function measures from 165 participants in New England during July and August, 2004 and compared these measures to outdoor air pollution using single and multiple pollutant models. Increases of 10mug/m3 PM2.5, 10 ppb O3, and 1 ppb NO2 were associated with -1.29%, -0.54%, and -0.151 % changes in FEV1 of asthmatic participants spending more than 5 hours outdoors, respectively. Effects for non-asthmatic and all participants spending less than 5 hours outdoors were near zero and not significant. There was also evidence indicating that the largest effects were observed 3 days after the pollution event. Results suggest that asthmatic participants should avoid prolonged exposure to even moderately elevated levels of O3, PM2.5, NO2. We found that measuring the amount of time spent outdoors was important in determining effect estimates

Using pivots to explore heterogeneous collections: A case study in musicology

In order to provide a better e-research environment for musicologists, the musicSpace project has partnered with musicology’s leading data publishers, aggregated and enriched their data, and developed a richly featured exploratory search interface to access the combined dataset. There have been several significant challenges to developing this service, and intensive collaboration between musicologists (the domain experts) and computer scientists (who developed the enabling technologies) was required. One challenge was the actual aggregation of the data itself, as this was supplied adhering to a wide variety of different schemas and vocabularies. Although the domain experts expended much time and effort in analysing commonalities in the data, as data sources of increasing complexity were added earlier decisions regarding the design of the aggregated schema, particularly decisions made with reference to simpler data sources, were often revisited to take account of unanticipated metadata types. Additionally, in many domains a single source may be considered to be definitive for certain types of information. In musicology, this is essentially the case with the “works lists” of composers’ musical compositions given in Grove Music Online (http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/public/book/omo_gmo), and so for musicSpace, we have mapped all sources to the works lists from Grove for the purposes of exploration, specifically to exploit the accuracy of its metadata in respect to dates of publication, catalogue numbers, and so on. Therefore, rather than mapping all fields from Grove to a central model, it would be far quicker (in terms of development time) to create a system to “pull-in” data from other sources that are mapped directly to the Grove works lists

musicSpace: integrating musicology's heterogeneous data sources

A significant barrier to the research endeavours of musicologists (and humanities scholars more generally) is the sheer amount of potentially relevant information that has accumulated over centuries. Whereas researchers once faced the daunting prospect of physically scouring through endless primary and secondary sources in order to answer the basic whats, wheres and whens of history, these sources and the data they contain are now increasingly available online. Yet the vast increase in the online availability of data, the heterogeneity of this data, the plethora of data providers, and, moreover, the inability of current search tools to manipulate metadata in useful and intelligent ways, means that extracting large tranches of basic factual information or running multi-part search queries is still enormously and needlessly time consuming. Accordingly, the musicSpace project is exploiting Semantic Web technologies (Berners-Lee et al., 2001) to develop a search interface that integrates access to musicology’s largest and most significant online resources. This will make previously intractable search queries tractable, thus allowing our users to spend their research time more efficiently and ultimately aiding the attainment of new knowledge. This brief paper gives an overview of our work