Teaching a New Paradigm: Towards Rewarding Instruction for Librarian and Students

Library staff at the University of Victoria identified four main literacy instruction challenges - time, lack of student engagement, lack of relevancy to students, and lack of faculty awareness. They presented proposed solutions to address these issues. A handout was circulated and is included here

Crossing Boundaries: Facing the Challenges of Library Instruction and Research for Evolving Interdisciplinary Topics

This session will address the rise in interdisciplinary programs and research on university campuses, their impact on libraries, and discuss some ways of dealing with the complexities involved in helping students try to access information from across multiple departmental lines. Increasingly, as new fields and perspectives emerge from the strengths of other disciplines, instruction and reference librarians are faced with the often tricky challenge of educating students on how best to find research on their new and emerging topics. And this challenge is not going away—new programs and fields of research are burgeoning across university campuses everywhere as scholars seek understanding of topics that are often too broad for one academic discipline to cover alone, such as climate change, child poverty, or the global AIDS pandemic. Because academic disciplines often develop their own unique languages and methodologies, communication between disciplines is limited. Research often rests in departmental silos with little or no conversation between them, posing daunting challenges for the researcher who is trying to find common ground within the various literatures. To meet this challenge, librarians must consider strategies beyond the traditional ones we have developed over time with already-existing disciplines. An openness to new, different, and unconventional approaches and methodology is essential in being able to deliver meaningful information literacy to the student doing interdisciplinary research. Librarians must be ready to meet this challenge. This session will provide some approaches, techniques, and perspectives to consider when addressing interdisciplinary study

The effects of technology on interpersonal fraud

Fraud has expanded in frequency as e-commerce has become a dominant part of business strategy and found widespread use. Previous research in the Information Systems domain has focused on how the adoption of technology influences behavioral decisions, and previous research in the accounting domain has typically explored why people choose to commit fraud. However, a holistic model of how technology influences a person\u27s decision to commit a criminal act, such as fraud, is underrepresented. This manuscript explores how the characteristics of the technologies being used to facilitate e-commerce transactions affect the complex cognitive and social processes that result in fraud. The fraud triangle is a useful and widely supported representation of the elements necessary for a perpetrator to engage in fraud: a perceived pressure that motivates action, a perceived opportunity to successfully deceive another individual, and the ability to rationalize an act of fraud. By combining extant research in the fields of accounting and information systems, this manuscript incorporates the fraud triangle into a behavioral model that can be used to measure how the capabilities of the technologies being used to facilitate online transactions influence a person\u27s decision-making processes and, ultimately, their choices related to fraudulent behaviors

Teaching a New Paradigm: Towards Rewarding Instruction for Librarian and Students

Library staff at the University of Victoria identified four main literacy instruction challenges - time, lack of student engagement, lack of relevancy to students, and lack of faculty awareness. They presented proposed solutions to address these issues. A handout was circulated and is included here

An Unusual Zoonosis: Liver Abscess Secondary to Asymptomatic Colonic Foreign Body

A liver abscess may arise following any insult to gut integrity allowing portal drainage of bacteria to hepatocytes. Foreign bodies such as bones, toothpicks and items of stationery have previously been implicated in compromising gut epithelium. Here we present the case of a 57 year old man suffering from a left liver abscess. This was defined on CT which incidentally also identified a chicken bone protruding through the wall of the distal sigmoid colon. Whilst unwell with upper abdominal pain and sepsis, the presumed source of portal sepsis within the colon remained asymptomatic throughout. Following percutaneous drainage, the liver abscess resolved but the chicken bone had not passed at two months, necessitating atraumatic removal at colonoscopy. A high rate of incidental diagnoses suggests that unidentified foreign bodies may be vastly under recognised in cases of hepatic sepsis. Thus, identification of the precise mechanism of the liver insult demands thorough consideration; foreign body should be considered in all cases

Application Intrusion Detection: Security for Cloud Deployments

As servers move to the cloud, sources for security analysis become more limited. Security teams must make the most of the resources available to them. Our project attempts to fulfill this need by providing a template-based application to analyze and detect security events in logs that are available in cloud environments. We focus on authentication logs, but analysis modules can be added to flag anomalies in any log. The deliverables include log analysis, including successive repeated failures, location-based anomalies, and excessive failed login attempts across multiple accounts. To present our findings we output the results to a web interface for further analysis by a security team. Our project was limited by time, knowledge, available hardware and log sources. Under these constraints we developed a server-based solution that analyzes authentication logs and presents the data in an easily understood format. An authentication data log for a large organization can contain millions of events. To narrow down the large volume of information into a manageable number of interesting events, we analyzed the data-based on a set of our proposed criteria. The information that results from the analysis is easily read and used for further investigation into possible malicious behavior. The market impact of a comprehensive security engine capable of analyzing large amounts of seemingly unconnected data and reducing them into only the interesting entries would be significant. It would save security teams time, improve the incident detection efficiency, and help focus efforts and funds where they are needed most.https://scholarscompass.vcu.edu/capstone/1095/thumbnail.jp

Cohort-Specific Online Discussion Experiences: A Collaborative And Multidisciplinary Approach To Improving Student Learning

Research addressing the effects of cohort size on student success in asynchronous online discussions is sparse.  As such, the following study attempted to determine an optimal student cohort size to enhance success and engagement within online discussions in general education courses at a large post-secondary university consisting of predominately adult learners.  Experimental courses split mandatory discussions into one, two, or three cohorts to maintain a discussion size of no more than ten students per cohort per week.  The effects of cohort size on student grade-point-average (GPA), withdraw rate, fail rate, and progression rate was evaluated in addition to effects on student satisfaction as measured by end-of-course surveys (EoCS).  Results showed no significant difference in either student success or student satisfaction between courses with one, two, or three online discussion cohorts.  Future online education research should focuses on upper division courses where students might benefit from smaller group discussions

Gender & Physical Activity and Their Relationship to Binge Drinking & Overall Frequencey of Alcohol Consumption Among Adolescents

The purpose of this study is to explore how gender and physical activity (PA)are related to alcohol use (AU) among adolescents. A better understanding offactors that influence AU among adolescents will facilitate the developmentof preventive interventions in this population.The sample was pulled from the 2011 Youth Risk Behavior SurveillanceSystem (YRBSS), which used a systematic equal probability sampling of9-12 graders. It was hypothesized that males would have higher rates of AUthan would females. PA was also hypothesized to show stronger associationswith AU among males than among females.Consistent with our hypothesis, males were found to consume morealcohol versus females. Though a select-few research studies have found anassociation between higher levels of PA and high levels of alcohol use, thelarge association we found was unexpected. Additionally, we predictedappropriately that PA would have a greater influence on AU among males.While prior research has determined the importance of PA in advancinghealth-related outcomes, relatively few studies have examined therelationship between PA and specific problem health behaviors amongadolescents. Therefore, identifying the factors that influence the relationshipbetween PA and AU is important

Explaining Africa\u27s (Dis)Advantage

Africa’s economic performance has been widely viewed with pessimism. In this paper, firm-level data for around 80 countries are used to examine formal firm performance. Without controls, manufacturing African firms perform significantly worse than firms in other regions. They have lower productivity levels and growth rates, export less, and have lower investment rates. Once geography, political competition, and the business environment are controlled for, formal African firms lead in productivity levels and growth. Africa’s conditional advantage is higher in low-tech than in high-tech manufacturing, and exists in manufacturing but not in services. The key factors explaining Africa’s disadvantage at the firm level are lack of infrastructure, access to finance, and political competition