The Psychologist, the Philosopher, and the Librarian The Information Literacy Version of CRITIC

The information-literacy version of CRITIC expands upon Wayne R. Bartz\u27s development of that acronym. This step-by-step method for introductory critical thinking is reinforced by an exercise inspired by Bertrand Russell

Digital Commons Annual Report

The Digital Commons Annual Report is a document that interested parties may use as a means of monitoring the yearly progress of the Butler University Libraries’ institutional repository

Using the CRITIC acronym to teach information evaluation

Currently, college students are being presented with a wide array of information. This wealth of information may come from such sources as article databases, books, serials, or the often unregulated Internet. Thus, teaching college students how to evaluate information has become a crucial role for the modern instruction librarian. Unfortunately, most of these efforts seem to focus on Web evaluation with little being done to address print sources

Early Recognition of Human Activities from First-Person Videos Using Onset Representations

In this paper, we propose a methodology for early recognition of human activities from videos taken with a first-person viewpoint. Early recognition, which is also known as activity prediction, is an ability to infer an ongoing activity at its early stage. We present an algorithm to perform recognition of activities targeted at the camera from streaming videos, making the system to predict intended activities of the interacting person and avoid harmful events before they actually happen. We introduce the novel concept of 'onset' that efficiently summarizes pre-activity observations, and design an approach to consider event history in addition to ongoing video observation for early first-person recognition of activities. We propose to represent onset using cascade histograms of time series gradients, and we describe a novel algorithmic setup to take advantage of onset for early recognition of activities. The experimental results clearly illustrate that the proposed concept of onset enables better/earlier recognition of human activities from first-person videos

Intraspeaker Comparisons of Acoustic and Articulatory Variability in American English /r/ Productions

The purpose of this report is to test the hypothesis that speakers utilize an acoustic, rather than articulatory, planning space for speech production. It has been well-documented that many speakers of American English use different tongue configurations to produce /r/ in different phonetic contexts. The acoustic planning hypothesis suggests that although the /r/ configuration varies widely in different contexts, the primary acoustic cue for /r/, a dip in the F3 trajectory, will be less variable due to tradeoffs in articulatory variability, or trading relations, that help maintain a relatively constant F3 trajectory across phonetic contexts. Acoustic data and EMMA articulatory data from seven speakers producing /r/ in different phonetic contexts were analyzed. Visual inspection of the EMMA data at the point of F3 minimum revealed that each speaker appeared to use at least two of three trading relation strategies that would be expected to reduce F3 variability. Articulatory covariance measures confirmed that all seven speakers utilized a trading relation between tongue back height and tongue back horizontal position, six speakers utilized a trading relation between tongue tip height and tongue back height, and the speaker who did not use this latter strategy instead utilized a trading relation between tongue tip height and tongue back horizontal position. Estimates of F3 variability with and without the articulatory covariances indicated that F3 would be much higher for all speakers if the articulatory covariances were not utilized. These conclusions were further supported by a comparison of measured F3 variability to F3 variabilities estimated from the pellet data with and without articulatory covariances. In all subjects, the actual F3 variance was significantly lower than the F3 variance estimated without articulatory covariances, further supporting the conclusion that the articulatory trading relations were being used to reduce F3 variability. Together, these results strongly suggest that the neural control mechanisms underlying speech production make elegant use of trading relations between articulators to maintain a relatively invariant acoustic trace for /r/ across phonetic contexts

Intraspeaker Comparisons of Acoustic and Articulatory Variability in American English /r/ Productions

The purpose of this report is to test the hypothesis that speakers utilize an acoustic, rather than articulatory, planning space for speech production. It has been well-documented that many speakers of American English use different tongue configurations to produce /r/ in different phonetic contexts. The acoustic planning hypothesis suggests that although the /r/ configuration varies widely in different contexts, the primary acoustic cue for /r/, a dip in the F3 trajectory, will be less variable due to tradeoffs in articulatory variability, or trading relations, that help maintain a relatively constant F3 trajectory across phonetic contexts. Acoustic data and EMMA articulatory data from seven speakers producing /r/ in different phonetic contexts were analyzed. Visual inspection of the EMMA data at the point of F3 minimum revealed that each speaker appeared to use at least two of three trading relation strategies that would be expected to reduce F3 variability. Articulatory covariance measures confirmed that all seven speakers utilized a trading relation between tongue back height and tongue back horizontal position, six speakers utilized a trading relation between tongue tip height and tongue back height, and the speaker who did not use this latter strategy instead utilized a trading relation between tongue tip height and tongue back horizontal position. Estimates of F3 variability with and without the articulatory covariances indicated that F3 would be much higher for all speakers if the articulatory covariances were not utilized. These conclusions were further supported by a comparison of measured F3 variability to F3 variabilities estimated from the pellet data with and without articulatory covariances. In all subjects, the actual F3 variance was significantly lower than the F3 variance estimated without articulatory covariances, further supporting the conclusion that the articulatory trading relations were being used to reduce F3 variability. Together, these results strongly suggest that the neural control mechanisms underlying speech production make elegant use of trading relations between articulators to maintain a relatively invariant acoustic trace for /r/ across phonetic contexts

Improving financial information literacy in introduction to financial accounting

The motivation for this study came from a desire to improve teaching of the use of accounting information for decision making. The information literacy standards and related performance indicators guided the development of a semester-long case study by accounting faculty and academic business librarians. Their collaboration yielded a series of instruction modules and related student exercises leading up to a group activity involving the evaluation of a company as a potential investment for retirement savings. Students enrolled in two sections of an introductory accounting course volunteered to participate in this study. They provided information about their knowledge before and after all of the activities using a repeated measures research design involving pre-test and post-test questionnaires. The results of the study suggest significant improvements in financial information literacy upon completion of the case study

Automated glycan assembly of a S. pneumoniae serotype 3 CPS antigen

Vaccines against S. pneumoniae, one of the most prevalent bacterial infections causing severe disease, rely on isolated capsular polysaccharide (CPS) that are conjugated to proteins. Such isolates contain a heterogeneous oligosaccharide mixture of different chain lengths and frame shifts. Access to defined synthetic S. pneumoniae CPS structures is desirable. Known syntheses of S. pneumoniae serotype 3 CPS rely on a time-consuming and low-yielding late-stage oxidation step, or use disaccharide building blocks which limits variability. Herein, we report the first iterative automated glycan assembly (AGA) of a conjugation-ready S. pneumoniae serotype 3 CPS trisaccharide. This oligosaccharide was assembled using a novel glucuronic acid building block to circumvent the need for a late-stage oxidation. The introduction of a washing step with the activator prior to each glycosylation cycle greatly increased the yields by neutralizing any residual base from deprotection steps in the synthetic cycle. This process improvement is applicable to AGA of many other oligosaccharides

First-Person Activity Recognition: What Are They Doing to Me?

This paper discusses the problem of recognizing interaction-level human activities from a first-person view-point. The goal is to enable an observer (e.g., a robot or a wearable camera) to understand ‘what activity others are performing to it ’ from continuous video inputs. These include friendly interactions such as ‘a person hugging the observer ’ as well as hostile interactions like ‘punching the observer ’ or ‘throwing objects to the observer’, whose videos involve a large amount of camera ego-motion caused by physical interactions. The paper investigates multi-channel kernels to integrate global and local motion in-formation, and presents a new activity learning/recognition methodology that explicitly considers temporal structures displayed in first-person activity videos. In our experi-ments, we not only show classification results with seg-mented videos, but also confirm that our new approach is able to detect activities from continuous videos reliably. 1