Student Perspectives of Political Bias in the College Classroom

The purpose of this study was to explore how students experience political bias in the college classroom and the extent to which this bias is perceived by students in one midsized, public, land-grant university in the Southeastern United States. The current study addressed the issue of politically biased college professors in U.S. college classrooms, a matter that has gained attention in academia and the general public in recent years. A review of literature explored both partisan research and the limited available peer-reviewed research addressing political bias in the classroom. The research model, the sequential, exploratory mixed methods model, was described followed by the results of the study. Three qualitative themes common to subjects\u27 experiences with political bias in the classroom were identified through interview data: limited classroom scope, a feeling of powerlessness and a need to conform. Survey data supported the existence of these themes, as they were all found to be positive indicators of self-reported experiences with political bias in the classroom. Survey data also illustrated political conservatism as a positive indicator for the experience of political bias in the classroom. Gender and ethnicity were found to have mixed results and will require further research. The academic classification freshman was found to be a negative indicator of experience with political bias in the classroom, but no other academic classification was found to have a relationship to the experience. The role of academic classification also requires further research. This study also found that political bias is not as pervasive at the study institution as the findings of many non-peer reviewed and partisan research studies would suggest. Also, while conservative students report higher levels of political bias, political bias is not experienced only by conservative students

Do the Ethics of Authorship Matter?: Exploring the Implications of the Office of Research Integrity\u27s Narrow Definition of Research Misconduct

Over the past 25 years, federal government entities have become involved in defining and regulating misconduct in scientific research. Consistently, these definitions of research misconduct forbid three key actions--falsification, fabrication, and plagiarism--but do not take into account other professional communication issues, mainly authorship. This lack of acknowledgement and regulation of authorship--particularly from the Office of Research Integrity, the nation\u27s highest research ethics body--seems to imply and communicate that the ethics of authorship are not important in science. However, this thesis demonstrates, through rhetorical, historical and interview research, that authorship ethics do matter to scientists; in fact, authorship is a leading concern, even if not defined or regulated by federal oversight bodies. The thesis then recommends how authorship ethics can be better acknowledged by federal oversight boards without slipping into positivistic rules and requirements, and includes a recommendation to integrate ethics instruction into science curricula

Infektion’s Evolution: Digital Technologies and Narrative Laundering

Perhaps Russia’s most notorious disinformation campaign to date was Operation INFEKTION, an activemeasures campaign designed to persuade the world that the United States was responsible for the creation of the AIDS virus (Boghardt, 2009; Selvage & Nehring, 2019). The effort, perhaps more properly referred to by its Russian codename, Operation Denver, began in 1983 with the planting of a fictious letter to the editor in The Patriot, an Indian newspaper created some years earlier by the KGB for the purposes of spreading pro-Soviet propaganda. The letter, entitled “AIDS may Invade India,” was purported to be written by a respected American scientist and claimed that the virus originated at the US chemical and biological warfare research facility at Fort Detrick, Maryland. This original source was then cited in later KGB efforts to further spread the conspiracy theory. The conspiracy theory remains rooted in some communities. A 2006 study found as many as a quarter of Black Americans believe AIDS to originate from a U.S. government laboratory (Ross et al., 2006). Operation Denver illustrates a key goal of many disinformation campaigns, that of narrative laundering. Narrative laundering is a process with the goal to conceal the origins and sourcing of false or misleading information.1 The process can be thought of as proceeding in three stages (Korta, 2018; Meleshevich & Schafer, 2018). The first stage is placement, the initial posting of the false information. Recent campaigns, including Russian campaign to reveal information from the Podesta email hack, have relied on inauthentic social media accounts for this purpose. Following placement is layering, the spread of that information from its origin to more credible sources. Repetition of a narrative itself brings a perception of credibility, and so this process has also been engaged in by employing both authentic and inauthentic social media accounts. The final stage is integration. This is the point at which the information becomes endorsed by more credible and genuine sources and is widely disseminated by real users. Proceeding through these three stages, this report will describe the details of a current Russia-linked narrative laundering campaign combining traditional KGB laundering tactics observed as part of Operation Denver with modern digital technologies, including social media, digital publishing, and artificial intelligence. While this report will focus on one narrative for the purposes of illustration, we will show that the campaign is linked to at least twelve wholly fabricated stories circulating with varying degrees of success through the digital ecosystem. The affordances offered by digital technologies have impacted every stage of the narrative-laundering process. The ubiquity and reach of video-intensive social media platforms with extremely limited provenance substantially reduces the costs of placement. The rise of social media as the primary way that readers encounter news eases layering. Inauthentic actors have several ways to tamper with how novel narratives are presented, including the creation of fake accounts and the harnessing of ideologically focused communities. Small media outlets can easily have worldwide reach, while online financial integration means that transacting with those outlets is easier than ever. Finally, and most dramatically, technological changes in digital publishing and AI have enable an entirely novel strategy of integration—the de novo creation of a credible and (seemingly) mainstream media outlet to directly deliver the layered narratives to the target audiences. These technological changes mean the campaign described in this report distributes false narratives faster, at greater volume, and at lower costs than was the case with Soviet-era campaigns. Unlike many of the recent Russian-aligned activities (such as the 2015-2017 IRA campaign (Linvill & Warren, 2020) or Secondary Infektion (Nimmo et al., 2020), this is not, primarily, a social-media phenomenon with substantial investments in fake persona with social clout. Instead, this campaign also represents a return to the past, but turbo-charged with modern technology

That Uplifting Tweet You Just Shared? A Russian Troll Sent It

Internet trolls don’t troll. Not the professionals at least. Professional trolls don’t go on social media to antagonize liberals or belittle conservatives. They are not narrow minded, drunk or angry. They don’t lack basic English language skills. They certainly aren’t “somebody sitting on their bed that weighs 400 pounds,” as the president once put it. Your stereotypical trolls do exist on social media, but the amateurs aren’t a threat to Western democracy Professional trolls, on the other hand, are the tip of the spear in the new digital, ideological battleground. To combat the threat they pose, we must first understand them — and take them seriously

Laying a Foundation for Nevada's Electricity Future: Generation Facility Uncertainties and the Need for a Flexible Infrastructure

Outlines the need to build an infrastructure that can support distributed and centralized resources, and describes the elements required: interconnection of power companies, efficiency programs, renewable energy projects, and complementary gas generation

Study of a System for Following a Flight Progress Schedule

A schedule-following system for an airplane is a servomechanism. By use of conventional design techniques the system can be made to operate successfully up to the limits of the fixed part of the system, which is the airplane itself and the navigation system. For a Lockheed Constellation and an accurate (± 250 feet) navigation system, the speed control can have a bandwidth of about 0.4 cycle per minute and a speed range of about ± 15 percent of cruising speed, and the position can be controlled to within about ± 500 feet. Winds and navigation noise are the main corrupting disturbances on the system. By proper design of the control system, the effect of winds on ground speed can be diminished almost to extinction as long as the required air speed is within the range of the airplane engine. Navigation-system errors cannot be overcome by compensation. During initial approach, use of airbrakes to provide negative thrust and use of gravity to provide additional positive thrust can increase the incremental thrust range by a factor of four for a descent of 1 foot in 10

Optimization of Operating Conditions of a Mixed Liquor Fermenter for Enhanced Biological Phosphorus Removal

Enhanced biological phosphorus removal (EBPR) has been used for the past 40 years in municipal wastewater treatment to meet declining effluent total phosphorus (TP) limits. While primary fermentation is not new to EBPR, the use of a sidestream fermentation in the Bardenpho configuration of a wastewater treatment plant (WWTP) is a relatively new design that has proven difficult to model (Barnard et al. 2017, Houweling et al. 2010). Sidestream fermentation involves diverting a portion of the return activated sludge (RAS) or anaerobic mixed liquor to a sidestream bioreactor, which allows activated sludge time to settle and collect, allowing volatile fatty acids (VFA) production to take place (Houweling et al. 2010). This configuration is favored over primary fermentation because it helps overcome shortcomings of primary fermentation to allow for consistently high TP removal despite low or fluctuating VFA:TP ratio of the plant's influent (Barnard et al. 2017). Polyphosphate accumulating organisms (PAOs) and denitrifying polyphosphate accumulating organisms (dPAOs) are responsible for the removal of phosphate from wastewater in the EBPR process. The sidestream fermenter with its increased VFA:TP ratio should select for dPAOs, which are preferred over PAOs because of their ability to remove P and nitrogen from wastewater simultaneously. An enriched dPAO population has the potential to reduce operational costs of plants because of the savings on oxygen and carbon sources as compared to EBPR plants with only a PAO community. The objective of this study was the optimization of a full-scale sidestream fermenter EBPR WWTP to select for dPAOs. The WWTP is a 2.5 annual MGD three-stage Bardenpho plant with a mixed liquor suspended solids (MLSS) sidestream fermenter. The WWTP operates without effluent filtration or the addition of carbon or ferric chloride to assist with biological nutrient removal (Kobylinski et al. 2019). Based on preliminary correlations of operating data, it is hypothesized there are four contributing factors to the optimization of an EBPR WWTP with sidestream fermentation: 1) the readily biodegradable chemical oxygen demand (rbCOD):TP ratio, 2) oxidation-reduction potential (ORP), 3) volatile fatty acids (VFA) concentration, and 4) the solids retention time (SRT) of the fermenter. Of these four parameters, only SRT can be easily affected by WWTP operators. Over the 15 weeks of this experiment, the SRT of the WWTP was stepwise increased every three weeks to test SRTs from ~1.1 days to ~2.4 days. The SRT of the fermenter was held at approximately 1.1 days, 1.3 days, 1.5 days, 2.0 days, and 2.4 days for three weeks each to reach stabilization and conduct batch sludge activity tests for specific oxygen uptake rate (SOUR), max nitrification rate, dPAO activity, and sludge volume index (SVI). Operational data was collected for the duration of the experiment from both inline probes and daily and weekly lab tests. Finally, microbial analysis (flourescent in situ hybridization (FISH), qPCR, and Neisser staining) was conducted on grab samples collected throughout the 15-week experiment to investigate community shifts in PAOs and GAOs. All three types of data collected in this experiment showed a positive correlation with increased SRT. The operational data showed a statistically significant correlation between the formation of VFAs and the fermenter SRT between 1.1 and 2.4 days. The activity data was the least correlated with the change in fermenter SRT. The microbial data from fluorescent in situ hybridization (FISH) and quantitative polymerase chain reaction (qPCR) showed very promising results with a strong correlation to the increase in PAOs in the WWTP and the increasing SRT of the fermenter. Based on the results of this study, a sidestream fermenter should be operated around an SRT of 2.0 days to optimize VFA creation to select for PAOs that complete EBPR. These results are at the higher end of previous work by Barnard et al. in 2017, which put the ideal SRT between 1.5 and 2 days (Barnard et al. 2017). This study confirmed that a WWTP with low influent rbCOD:TP ratio could still reach low P effluent levels through EBPR without the added expense of supplemental carbon by adjusting the SRT of the sidestream fermenter to create the VFAs necessary to select for organisms that remove phosphorous from wastewater (WW)