MassMine: Collecting and Archiving Big Data for Social Media Humanities Researchers

The MassMine project team representing participants from the Department of English, George A. Smathers Libraries (Libraries), and Research Computing at the University of Florida (UF) requests $60,000 to finish the version 1.0 release, develop a robust training program, and promote the MassMine open source software. MassMine enables researchers to collect their own social media data archives and supports data mining, thus providing free access to big data for academic inquiry. MassMine further supports researchers in creating and defining methods and measures for analyzing cultural and localized trends, and developing humanities research questions and data mining practices. The primary aims of this project are to: 1) refine the MassMine tools to support collection, acquisition, and use of available social media and web data; and, 2) develop a training program and corresponding online resources for supporting the broad use of MassMine by humanities researchers, regardless of experience

Accurate Realizations of the Ionized Gas in Galaxy Clusters: Calibrating Feedback

Using the full, three-dimensional potential of galaxy cluster halos (drawn from an N-body simulation of the current, most favored cosmology), the distribution of the X-ray emitting gas is found by assuming a polytropic equation of state and hydrostatic equilibrium, with constraints from conservation of energy and pressure balance at the cluster boundary. The resulting properties of the gas for these simulated redshift zero clusters (the temperature distribution, mass-temperature and luminosity-temperature relations, and the gas fraction) are compared with observations in the X-ray of nearby clusters. The observed properties are reproduced only under the assumption that substantial energy injection from non-gravitational sources has occurred. Our model does not specify the source, but star formation and AGN may be capable of providing this energy, which amounts to 3 to 5 x10^{-5} of the rest mass in stars (assuming ten percent of the gas initially in the cluster forms stars). With the method described here it is possible to generate realistic X-ray and Sunyaev-Zel'dovich cluster maps and catalogs from N-body simulations, with the distributions of internal halo properties (and their trends with mass, location, and time) taken into account.Comment: Matches ApJ published version; 30 pages, 7 figure

Offside goals and induced breaches of contract

An analysis of Global Resources Group Ltd v Mackay which explores the possibility of building links between the offside goals rule and nominate delict of inducing breach of contract

Examining resistance, accommodation and the pursuit of aspiration in the Indian IT‐BPO space: reflections on two case studies

This article is based on case studies of two organisations: an India-based information technology (IT) services company and a financial services company located in the UK and India. Although they operate in different sectors and have some notable contrasts, both can be seen as typifying aspects of India\u27s new economy. Our article explores the lived experience of working in this economy—a perspective that has been relatively neglected in the extant literature. Drawing on Homi Bhabha\u27s notions of ambivalence and mimicry, and V. S. Naipaul\u27s powerful illustrations of these concepts in his fiction and non-fiction works, we report on how respondents talked about their aspirations within India\u27s emerging economy, and examine their mobilisation of particular discursive resources as forms of accommodation and resistance to the demands they face at work

It's a Good Year for Blimp-1 (and Plasma Cells)

AbstractImmunoglobulin secreting plasma cells are critical mediators of an effective humoral immune response. In this issue of Immunity, an article by Shapiro-Shelef et al. defines an essential role for the transcription factor Blimp-1 in plasma cell differentiation and preplasma memory B cell formation

A Digital Divide? Assessing Self-Perceived Communication Competency in an Online and Face-to-Face Basic Public Speaking Course

Previous research has documented an inverse relationship between speaking anxiety and self-perceived communication competence (SPCC). However, a recent assessment case study of an online basic public speaking course revealed that while the course decreased students’ speaking anxiety, it failed to increase their SPCC. Prompted by this surprising discrepancy and bolstered by continuing calls for increased exploration of educational quality of online public speaking courses, the current study compared SPCC between online (n = 147) and face-to-face (F2F) (n = 544) delivery of the large, standardized, multi-section basic public speaking course at our institution. Pretest scores of students’ overall SPCC were not significantly different between learning modalities. By the end of the F2F course, students perceived significant increases in SPCC. In stark contrast, however, the online sections failed to produce significant changes in SPCC. These findings suggest that the online basic public speaking course at our institution may not be designed in a way which promotes the development of SPCC—an important marker of our programmatic assessment. These results also draw attention to the need for further research assessing the comparison of delivery methods of the basic communication course and further discussion of best practices for online delivery of the course