A Usability Study on LIU Library Front Page

The Post Campus Library website was newly redesigned last year, receiving mixed reviews. The library front page offers a search engine to locate resources for a variety of tasks such as class assignments, final papers, and research projects. Due to the inconsistency of feedback, this project was designed to evaluate the LIU Library front page based on both cognitive walkthroughs and heuristic principles. For cognitive walkthrough evaluations, three personae were chosen from the target groups believed most likely to use the webpage: undergraduates, graduates, and faculty. For heuristic principles, four requirements were chosen on which to judge the webpage: match between real world and system, flexibility and efficiency of use, aesthetic and minimalist design, and structure of information. Overall the front page for the Post Campus Library has a streamlined, uncluttered, functional layout. The redesign of the library webpage successfully incorporates the most essential functions for most targeted user groups: getting help and performing a search. In addition, for all levels of users, there is a tailored user experience. However, several shortcomings emerged. These included platform (Mac, PC, and mobile phone) inconsistencies, functional deficiencies related to the primary search capability, and layout design that causes unnecessary scrolling and disrupts the logical flow of information. A future study of a survey to reach a broader set of users would reinforce the findings of this study

Parents' verbal communication and childhood anxiety: a systematic review

Parents’ verbal communication to their child, particularly the expression of fear-relevant information (e.g., attributions of threat to the environment), is considered to play a key role in children’s fears and anxiety. This review considers the extent to which parental verbal communication is associated with child anxiety by examining research that has employed objective observational methods. Using a systematic search strategy, we identified 15 studies that addressed this question. These studies provided some evidence that particular fear-relevant features of parental verbal communication are associated with child anxiety under certain conditions. However, the scope for drawing reliable, general conclusions was limited by extensive methodological variation between studies, particularly in terms of the features of parental verbal communication examined and the context in which communication took place, how child anxiety was measured, and inconsistent consideration of factors that may moderate the verbal communication–child anxiety relationship. We discuss ways in which future research can contribute to this developing evidence base and reduce further methodological inconsistency so as to inform interventions for children with anxiety problems

Implementing New Knowledge Environments: Year One Research Foundations

In this 2009 article, we present details of the first year work of the INKE (Implementing New Knowledge Environments) research group, a large international, interdisciplinary research team studying reading and texts, both digital and printed. The INKE team is comprised of researchers and stakeholders at the forefronts of fields relating to textual studies, user experience, interface design, and information management. We aim to contribute to the development of new digital information and knowledge environments that build on past textual practices. We discuss our research questions, methods, aims and research objectives, the rationale behind our work and its expected significance—specifically as it pertains to our first year goals of laying a research foundation for this endeavour.&nbsp

Mid-infrared imaging of the massive young star AFGL 2591: Probing the circumstellar environment of an outflow source

Most, if not all, stars are now believed to produce energetic outflows during their formation. Yet, almost 20 years after the discovery of bipolar outflows from young stars, the origins of this violent phenomenon are not well understood. One of the difficulties of probing the outflow process, particularly in the case of massive embedded stars, is a deficit of high spatial resolution observations. Here, we present sub-arcsecond-resolution mid-infrared images of one massive young stellar object, AFGL 2591, and its immediate surroundings. Our images, at 11.7, 12.5 and 18.0 microns, reveal a knot of emission ~6'' SW of the star, which may be evidence for a recent ejection event or an embedded companion star. This knot is roughly coincident with a previously seen near-infrared reflection nebula and a radio source, and lies within the known large-scale CO outflow. We also find a new faint NW source which may be another embedded lower-luminosity star. The IRAS mid-infrared spectrum of AFGL 2591 shows a large silicate absorption feature at 10 microns, implying that the primary source is surrounded by an optically thick dusty envelope. We discuss the interrelationship of these phenomena and suggest that mid-infrared imaging and spectroscopy provide powerful tools for probing massive star birth.Comment: 14 pages, 3 PostScript figures, accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal Letter

Socially anxious mothers’ narratives to their children, and their relation to child representations and adjustment

Anxious mothers’ parenting, particularly transfer of threat information, has been considered important in their children’s risk for social anxiety disorder (SAnxD), and maternal narratives concerning potential social threat could elucidate this contribution. Maternal narratives to their pre-school 4-5 year-old children, via a picture book about starting school, were assessed in socially anxious (N=73), and non-anxious (N=63) mothers. Child representations of school were assessed via Doll Play (DP). After one school term, mothers (CBCL) and teachers (TRF) reported on child internalizing problems, and child SAnxD was assessed via maternal interview. Relations between these variables, infant behavioral inhibition, and attachment, were examined. Socially anxious mothers showed more negative (higher threat attribution), and less supportive (lower encouragement) narratives, than controls, and their children’s DP representations, SAnxD and CBCL scores were more adverse. High narrative threat predicted child SAnxD; lower encouragement predicted negative child CBCL scores and, particularly for behaviorally inhibited children, TRF scores and DP representations. In securely attached children, CBCL scores and risk for SAnxD were affected by maternal anxiety and threat attributions, respectively. Low encouragement mediated the effects of maternal anxiety on child DP representations, and CBCL scores. Maternal narratives are affected by social anxiety, and contribute to adverse child outcome

Modeling the Multiwavelength Evolution of the V960 Mon System

We study the evolution of the FU Ori object V960 Mon since its outburst, using available multi-wavelength photometric time series over 8 years, complemented by several epochs of moderate-dispersion spectrophotometry. We find that the source fading can be well-described by a decrease in the temperature of the inner disk, which results from a combination of decreasing accretion rate and increasing inner disk radius. We model the system with a disk atmosphere model that produces the observed variations in multi-band photometry (this paper) and high resolution spectral lines (a companion paper).Comment: 15 pages, 13 figures, 2 tables, Accepted to Ap

Throughput and Power Consumption Comparisons of Zigbee-based and ISM-based Implementations of WSAN

Wireless sensor and actuator networks have expanding applications which requires better throughput, power efficiency and cost effectiveness. This study intends to contribute to the growing pool of knowledge on WSAN especially in the design for novel applications such as image or video over WSANs, and solar energy and RF energy harvesting for the WSAN nodes. Two basic scalable wireless sensor and actuator networks were implemented and characterized in terms of throughput and power consumption. The two WSANs are the Zigbee-based WSAN which is based on the IEEE 802.15.4 protocol, and the ISM-based Zigbee which makes use of the industrial, scientific and medical (ISM) radio bands. The star topology was used for both WSAN implementations. The throughput is quantified with varied factors including distance from node to node, obstructions in between nodes and cochannel interference. As distance and obstructions between nodes are increased, the throughput for both networks decreases with varying degrees. Co-channel interference is also considered. The ISM-based WSAN network is weak in dealing with co-channel interference and error rate as compared to the Zigbee-based WSAN, thus requiring it to have a better data encryption. Power consumption is generally larger for the ISM-based WSAN as compared to its Zigbee-based counterpart. However, the ISM-based nodes consume the same power even up to a few hundreds of meters distance and are thus practical for covering large distances. Therefore, the Zigbee-based WSAN system is more appropriate for closed environment, such as in room automation and home automation applications where distance from node to node is relatively shorter. The ISMbased WSAN prototype, on the other hand, can be developed further for applications in larger areas such as deployment in fields and cities, since transmission is not generally limited by distance and obstructions

‘The Apex of Hipster XML GeekDOM’

If the notion of the methodological commons is as centrally located as we believe it to be in any visualization accurately depicting the intellectual structure of the digital humanities and digital literary studies (McCarty 2005, 119), then so, too, must be the community itself whose members provide that which populates the commons. As an interdiscipline, humanities computing has always well-understood its methodologies; indeed, the digital humanities (of which digital literary studies is a part), more generally, have made a virtue of the way in which they render explicit and tangible the theoretical models that govern the representative and analytical endeavour of their fields via computational application.  So, too, have those in the field understood and documented its formal structures and institutional manifestations, a chief example being the Text Encoding Initiative itself.  Less explicitly rendered and less formally documented–though intuited by its chief practitioners and builders–is the exact nature of the community itself, its depth and breadth, its own centre and, perhaps more important in a field whose embrace of interdisciplinarity is far from self-serving, its periphery and those aspects of which promise to become central. This article presents work carried out in conjunction with the Text Encoding Initiative Consortium, a foundation of many digital literary studies projects, work that seeks to document the full nature of its community, from the institutional and research project groups that comprise the formal consortium at centre to those who appear on the other side of the easily-permeable periphery that separates it from the centre, largely individual practitioners in areas hitherto not closely identified with the digital humanities but clearly sharing methods and tools, thus suggesting their place in the same communities of practice, as they are members of the same methodological commons.  This methodological approach is drawn from marketing and organizational behavior, manifest in social networking, in the study of viral marketing campaigns conducted in online environments.  The method for this work was centred around a viral marketing experiment designed to showcase the TEI and novel ways that it can be used to encode different kinds of text.  At the heart of the experiment was a Bob Dylan song and its associated video which incorporated text; encoded text was overlaid and the video was posted to YouTube and a blog with links to the TEI website with analysis of traffic patterns carried out

Meningococcal carriage within households in the African meningitis belt: A longitudinal pilot study.

OBJECTIVES: Carriers of Neisseria meningitidis are a key source of transmission. In the African meningitis belt, where risk of meningococcal disease is highest, a greater understanding of meningococcal carriage dynamics is needed. METHODS: We randomly selected an age-stratified sample of 400 residents from 116 households in Bamako, Mali, and collected pharyngeal swabs in May 2010. A month later, we enrolled all 202 residents of 20 of these households (6 with known carriers) and collected swabs monthly for 6 months prior to MenAfriVac vaccine introduction and returned 10 months later to collect swabs monthly for 3 months. We used standard bacteriological methods to identify N. meningitidis carriers and fit hidden Markov models to assess acquisition and clearance overall and by sex and age. RESULTS: During the cross-sectional study 5.0% of individuals (20/400) were carriers. During the longitudinal study, 73 carriage events were identified from 1422 swabs analyzed, and 16.3% of individuals (33/202) were identified as carriers at least once. The majority of isolates were non-groupable; no serogroup A carriers were identified. CONCLUSIONS: Our results suggest that the duration of carriage with any N. meningitidis averages 2.9 months and that males and children acquire and lose carriage more frequently in an urban setting in Mali. Our study informed the design of a larger study implemented in seven countries of the African meningitis belt