Media Downloading, Uploading, and Sharing Among College Students

On many occasions over recent years the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) has made national headlines with its large-scale effort to launch civil suits against individuals alleged to be involved in illegal downloading of copyrighted material over the Internet including many college students. By reputation, college students are among the most active users of digital media obtained through peer-to-peer downloading and similar techniques. We conducted a three-phase study to understand student beliefs and behavior in the areas of media downloading, copyright, intellectual property ownership, and computing security. The research included a small cohort of personal interviews, an anonymous paper and pencil survey of 164 students, and a Web-based survey with 402 respondents

Enhancing Retention of Future Information Professionals Using Attitude Inoculation

Employment predictions in the field of Information Systems (IS) vary over time, but em- ployers often report a gap between the available IT workforce and their needs for skilled in- formation professionals. The existence of such gaps raises questions about how college stu- dents make decisions about persistence in majors with respect to available information about employment prospects. The main objective of this article is to understand whether and how inoculating messages may help students to maintain pre-existing positive attitudes towards occupational features of the IT profession; to explore why some choose to stay in the information technology disciplines; and to suggest potential solutions to augment the number of those who stay. This research study used Inoculation Theory to hypothesize that students who heard an inoculative message prior to a persuasive message concerning post-graduate employment would show a greater resistance to attitude change than students in a control group, and that there would be a difference in resistance to change based on gender and on program of study. The results of our field experiment showed that significant differences arose among the different groups of students. As hypothesized, the participants in the treatment group had more resistance to attitude change; participants in control groups were more affected by the persuasive message than participants who had received an inoculation treatment. The analyses did not detect significant differences in attitudes based on gender and major. These results have implications for effective retention of future information professionals

Circumlocution in diagnostic medical queries. In:

ABSTRACT Circumlocution is when many words are used to describe what could be said with fewer, e.g., "a machine that takes moisture out of the air" instead of "dehumidifier". Web search is a perfect backdrop for circumlocution where people struggle to name what they seek. In some domains, not knowing the correct term can have a significant impact on the search results that are retrieved. We study the medical domain, where professional medical terms are not commonly known and where the consequence of not knowing the correct term can impact the accuracy of surfaced information, as well as escalation of anxiety, and ultimately the medical care sought. Given a free-form colloquial health search query, our objective is to find the underlying professional medical term. The problem is complicated by the fact that people issue quite varied queries to describe what they have. Machine-learning algorithms can be brought to bear on the problem, but there are two key complexities: creating highquality training data and identifying predictive features. To our knowledge, no prior work has been able to crack this important problem due to the lack of training data. We give novel solutions and demonstrate their efficacy via extensive experiments, greatly improving over the prior art

Anr and Its Activation by PlcH Activity in Pseudomonas aeruginosa Host Colonization and Virulence

Pseudomonas aeruginosa hemolytic phospholipase C (PlcH) degrades phosphatidylcholine (PC), an abundant lipid in cell membranes and lung surfactant. A ΔplcHR mutant, known to be defective in virulence in animal models, was less able to colonize epithelial cell monolayers and was defective in biofilm formation on plastic when grown in lung surfactant. Microarray analyses found that strains defective in PlcH production had lower levels of Anr-regulated transcripts than the wild type. PC degradation stimulated the Anr regulon in an Anr-dependent manner under conditions where Anr activity was submaximal because of the presence of oxygen. Two PC catabolites, choline and glycine betaine (GB), were sufficient to stimulate Anr activity, and their catabolism was required for Anr activation. The addition of choline or GB to glucose-containing medium did not alter Anr protein levels, growth rates, or respiratory activity, and Anr activation could not be attributed to the osmoprotectant functions of GB. The Δanr mutant was defective in virulence in a mouse pneumonia model. Several lines of evidence indicate that Anr is important for the colonization of biotic and abiotic surfaces in both P. aeruginosa PAO1 and PA14 and that increases in Anr activity resulted in enhanced biofilm formation. Our data suggest that PlcH activity promotes Anr activity in oxic environments and that Anr activity contributes to virulence, even in the acute infection phase, where low oxygen tensions are not expected. This finding highlights the relationships among in vivo bacterial metabolism, the activity of the oxygen-sensitive regulator Anr, and virulence

Living ethics: a stance and its implications in health ethics

Moral or ethical questions are vital because they affect our daily lives: what is the best choice we can make, the best action to take in a given situation, and ultimately, the best way to live our lives? Health ethics has contributed to moving ethics toward a more experience-based and user-oriented theoretical and methodological stance but remains in our practice an incomplete lever for human development and flourishing. This context led us to envision and develop the stance of a “living ethics”, described in this inaugural collective and programmatic paper as an effort to consolidate creative collaboration between a wide array of stakeholders. We engaged in a participatory discussion and collective writing process known as instrumentalist concept analysis. This process included initial local consultations, an exploratory literature review, the constitution of a working group of 21 co-authors, and 8 workshops supporting a collaborative thinking and writing process. First, a living ethics designates a stance attentive to human experience and the role played by morality in human existence. Second, a living ethics represents an ongoing effort to interrogate and scrutinize our moral experiences to facilitate adaptation of people and contexts. It promotes the active and inclusive engagement of both individuals and communities in envisioning and enacting scenarios which correspond to their flourishing as authentic ethical agents. Living ethics encourages meaningful participation of stakeholders because moral questions touch deeply upon who we are and who we want to be. We explain various aspects of a living ethics stance, including its theoretical, methodological, and practical implications as well as some barriers to its enactment based on the reflections resulting from the collaborative thinking and writing process

A large genome-wide association study of age-related macular degeneration highlights contributions of rare and common variants.

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from Nature Publishing Group via http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/ng.3448Advanced age-related macular degeneration (AMD) is the leading cause of blindness in the elderly, with limited therapeutic options. Here we report on a study of >12 million variants, including 163,714 directly genotyped, mostly rare, protein-altering variants. Analyzing 16,144 patients and 17,832 controls, we identify 52 independently associated common and rare variants (P < 5 × 10(-8)) distributed across 34 loci. Although wet and dry AMD subtypes exhibit predominantly shared genetics, we identify the first genetic association signal specific to wet AMD, near MMP9 (difference P value = 4.1 × 10(-10)). Very rare coding variants (frequency <0.1%) in CFH, CFI and TIMP3 suggest causal roles for these genes, as does a splice variant in SLC16A8. Our results support the hypothesis that rare coding variants can pinpoint causal genes within known genetic loci and illustrate that applying the approach systematically to detect new loci requires extremely large sample sizes.We thank all participants of all the studies included for enabling this research by their participation in these studies. Computer resources for this project have been provided by the high-performance computing centers of the University of Michigan and the University of Regensburg. Group-specific acknowledgments can be found in the Supplementary Note. The Center for Inherited Diseases Research (CIDR) Program contract number is HHSN268201200008I. This and the main consortium work were predominantly funded by 1X01HG006934-01 to G.R.A. and R01 EY022310 to J.L.H