Social Media Enters the Mainstream: Report on the Use of Social Media in Advancement, 2014

Social media use is becoming increasingly engrained in the work of alumni relations, communications, fundraising and marketing professionals at educational institutions, according to results cited in a new white paper. This white paper reports on findings from the fifth survey of social media in advancement, conducted earlier this year by Huron Education and mStoner in partnership with the Council for Advancement and Support of Education. Nearly 2,000 respondents provided feedback on the tools they are using, how they use them, which are most successful and how to measure return on investment. Among the notable findings is growing recognition by advancement practitioners of the importance of social media to advancement. The white paper includes three profiles of institutional executives who successfully use social media

Paying to Play: Social Media in Advancement 2016

To cut through the growing chatter across social media channels, many educational institutions are paying to increase the visibility of their content on Facebook, Twitter and other digital platforms, according to a new white paper by CASE, Huron and mStoner, Inc."Paying to Play: Social Media in Advancement 2016" reports that 83 percent of surveyed respondents are boosting or promoting posts or advertising on Facebook; 16 percent are advertising or promoting tweets on Twitter and 9 percent report advertising on LinkedIn.Schools, colleges and universities worldwide are paying to boost and promote content as the organic reach across all social channels declines, write "Paying to Play" co-authors Jennifer Mack of Huron and Michael Stoner of mStoner Inc."Paying to improve exposure is the single best way to ensure that a particular piece of content reaches as many fans and followers as possible, allowing them the opportunity to engage with it in some way," according to Mack and Stoner.Surveyed institutions boosted, promoted or advertised posts to increase attendance at events, encourage more engagement with an important campaign and grow awareness of giving days, among other reasons. These institutions, however, were selective about which posts to boost as most don't yet have much, if any, budget for amplifying social content.Beyond this growing pay-to-play trend among educational institutions, the white paper reveals common practices of institutions that are most successful with social media. According to the white paper, these institutions are:More likely to boost, promote and advertise their postsMore likely to share content generated by their constituents on social channelsLikely to use social media for prospect researchAdept at turning their expertise in using social media into dollars for their institutionsOther findings include:Nearly 90 percent of respondents agreed that social media is a much more important part of their communications and marketing efforts than three years ago.When convincing senior leadership of the value of social media, 45 percent of respondents point to the opportunity to connect with new audiences while 42 percent name the ability to engage young alumni.Use of Instagram rose from 54 percent in 2015 to 65 percent in 2016.Use of Snapchat grew from 5 percent in 2015 to 15 percent in 2016."Paying to Play: Social Media in Advancement 2016" reports on findings from the seventh survey of social media in advancement, which was conducted earlier this year by Huron and mStoner in partnership with CASE. Nearly 1,200 respondents at educational institutions worldwide provided feedback on their use of social media

Ice Skating and Island Hopping: Refugees, Integration, and Access in a Segregated City

This paper analyzes the role of the environmental image in the process of integration for refugees living in Stockholm, Sweden. The research uses techniques that the urbanist Kevin Lynch developed to question residents of Boston, Jersey City, and Los Angeles regarding their “image of the city” in the late 1950s. While integration is generally measured in terms of quantitative successes—especially the percentage of refugees entering the Swedish labor market and at what level—this study uses Lynch’s qualitative methods, a combination of in-depth interviewing and mental mapping, to elicit personal feelings about a new existence in Stockholm, which is a highly segregated city. These interviews were conducted with participants in the Red Cross Refugee Introduction Program, a small-scale alternative to the City of Stockholm Integration Agency program but funded by the city. Additional information was gathered using more traditional interviews, held with government and Red Cross officials, and through analysis of the Swedish media coverage of integration issues. Naming three kinds of spaces where refugees participate in urban life with lesser degrees of social, psychological, and physical exclusion, this paper expands upon the context, methods, and findings, and then suggests some possible new directions for practice

Constraint-based automated reconstruction of grape bunches from 3D range data for high-throughput phenotyping

With increasing global population, the resources for agriculture required to feed the growing number of people are becoming scarce. Estimates expect that by 2050, 60 % more food will be necessary. Nowadays, 70 % of fresh water is used by agriculture and experts see no potential for new land to use for crop plants. This means that existing land has to be used efficiently in a sustainable way. To support this, plant breeders aim at the improvement of yield, quality, disease-resistance, and other important characteristics of the crops. Reports show that grapevine cultivation uses more than three times of the amount of fungicides than the cultivation of fruit trees or vegetables. This is caused by grapevine being prone to various fungal diseases and pests that quickly spread over fields. A loose grape bunch architecture is one of the most important physical barriers that make the establishment of a fungal infection less likely. The grape bunch architecture is mostly defined by the inner stem skeleton. The phenotyping of grape bunches refers to the measurement of the phenotypes, i.e., the observable traits of a plant, like the diameter of berries or the lengths of stems. Because of their perishable nature, grape bunches have to be processed in a relatively short time. On the other hand, genetic analyses require data from a large number of them. Manual phenotyping is error-prone and highly labor- and time-intensive, yielding the need for automated, high-throughput methods. The objective of this thesis is to develop a completely automated pipeline that gets as input a 3D pointcloud showing a grape bunch and computes a 3D reconstruction of the complete grape bunch, including the inner stem skeleton. The result is a 3D estimation of the grape bunch that represents not only dimensions (e.g. berry diameters) or statistics (e.g. the number of berries), but the geometry and topology as well. All architectural (i.e., geometrical and topological) traits can be derived from this complete 3D reconstruction. We aim at high-throughput phenotyping by automatizing all steps and removing any requirement for interaction with the user, while still providing an interface for a detailed visualization and possible adjustments of the parameters. There are several challenges to this task: ripe grape bunches are subject to a high amount of self-occlusion, rendering a direct reconstruction of the stem skeleton impossible. The stem skeleton structure is complex, thus, the manual creation of training data is hard. We aim at a cross-cultivation approach and there is high variability between cultivars and even between grape bunches of the same cultivar. Thus, we cannot rely on statistical distributions for single plant organ dimensions. We employ geometrical and topological constraints to meet the challenge of cross-cultivar optimization and foster efficient sampling of infinitely large hypotheses spaces, resulting in Pearson correlation coefficients between 0.7 and 0.9 for established traits traditionally used by breeders. The active working time is reduced by a factor of 12. We evaluate the pipeline for the application on scans taken in a lab environment and in the field

Communication interventions in adult and pediatric oncology: A scoping review and analysis of behavioral targets

BackgroundImproving communication requires that clinicians and patients change their behaviors. Interventions might be more successful if they incorporate principles from behavioral change theories. We aimed to determine which behavioral domains are targeted by communication interventions in oncology.MethodsSystematic search of literature indexed in Ovid Medline, Embase, Scopus, Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews, Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials, Clinicaltrials.gov (2000-October 2018) for intervention studies targeting communication behaviors of clinicians and/or patients in oncology. Two authors extracted the following information: population, number of participants, country, number of sites, intervention target, type and context, study design. All included studies were coded based on which behavioral domains were targeted, as defined by Theoretical Domains Framework.FindingsEighty-eight studies met inclusion criteria. Interventions varied widely in which behavioral domains were engaged. Knowledge and skills were engaged most frequently (85%, 75/88 and 73%, 64/88, respectively). Fewer than 5% of studies engaged social influences (3%, 3/88) or environmental context/resources (5%, 4/88). No studies engaged reinforcement. Overall, 7/12 behavioral domains were engaged by fewer than 30% of included studies. We identified methodological concerns in many studies. These 88 studies reported 188 different outcome measures, of which 156 measures were reported by individual studies.ConclusionsMost communication interventions target few behavioral domains. Increased engagement of behavioral domains in future studies could support communication needs in feasible, specific, and sustainable ways. This study is limited by only including interventions that directly facilitated communication interactions, which excluded stand-alone educational interventions and decision-aids. Also, we applied stringent coding criteria to allow for reproducible, consistent coding, potentially leading to underrepresentation of behavioral domains

Verbal morphology in agrammatic and anomic aphasia: comparison of structured vs. narrative elicitation tasks

Individuals with agrammatic aphasia show difficulty producing verb morphology (Arabatzi & Edwards, 2008). Various tasks ranging from spontaneous speech to constrained sentence level tasks have been used to detail these deficits and various subsets of verb inflections have been tested, resulting in mixed findings (see Lee, Milman, & Thompson, 2008 for review). In studies comparing production of finite (e.g., walks, walked) vs. nonfinite inflection forms (e.g., walking, to walk), agrammatic speakers show omission and substitution of finite tense markings in the face of relatively preserved nonfinite forms (e.g., LaPointe, 1985; Lee et al., 2008). However, little is known about verbal morphology in fluent aphasic speakers. Recently, Bastiaanse (2011) reported that fluent aphasic individuals may also experience greater difficulty with finite compared to nonfinite verbs in spontaneous speech. Despite the frequently observed verb morphology deficits in individuals with aphasia, no assessment tool is available for clinical or research purposes to quantify these deficits. In addition, little attention has been paid to the effects of different elicitation tasks on verb inflection deficits in aphasia. In this study, we examined production of verb inflection in agrammatic and anomic aphasia using two different elicitation methods: structured sentence completion and narrative production tasks. For the structured task, we used the Northwestern Assessment of Verb Inflection (NAVI; Lee & Thompson, experimental version), which was developed to assess both finite and nonfinite forms in English, using a sentence completion task. For the narrative task, we used the Cinderella story, one of the most commonly used tasks for eliciting narrative speech samples in aphasia research

English Studies as a Site for Healing: A Conversation about Place-Based and Indigenous Pedagogies in the English Classroom

This article summarizes a roundtable discussion from the 2016 Alaska Native Studies Conference among professors and students from two English Studies courses at the University of Alaska Anchorage: History of the English Language and History of Rhetoric. Jennifer and Heather discuss how the courses are traditionally taught and how they redesigned the courses to incorporate place-based and indigenous pedagogies. Then, Tayler, Samantha, Hailey, and Arlo--students from a range of backgrounds who took one or both of the classes--describe how the courses encouraged them to develop critical perspectives, build new knowledge through undergraduate research, and experience personal and professional transformations that led to advocacy. The dialogue provides a range of pedagogical perspectives and considers English Studies as a potential site for cultural and historical healing.Ye