Using Twitter in university research, teaching and impact activities: a guide for academics and researchers

Twitter is a form of free micro-blogging which allows users to send and receive short public messages called tweets. Tweets are limited to no more than 140 characters, and can include links to blogs, web pages, images, videos and all other material online. You can start tweeting in 10 minutes, anytime, from your computer, smart phone or tablet.By following other people and sources you are able to build up an instant, personalized Twitter feed that meets your full range of interests, both academic and personal. Thousands of academics and researchers at all levels of experience and across all disciplines already use Twitter daily, alongside more than 200 million other users.Yet how can such a brief medium have any relevance to universities and academia, where journal articles are 3,000 to 8,000 words long, and where books contain 80,000 words? Can anything of academic value ever be said in just 140 characters?This guide answers these questions, showing you how to get started on Twitter and showing you how Twitter can be used as a resource for research, teaching and impact activities

A 16 Bar Cut: The History Of American Musical Theatrean Original Script And Monograph Document

A final thesis for my Master of Fine Arts degree should encompass every aspect of the past few years spent in the class room. Therefore, as a perfect capstone to my degree, I have decided to conceive, write, and perform a new musical with my classmate Rockford Sansom entitled The History of Musical Theatre: A 16 Bar Cut. The History of Musical Theatre: A 16 Bar Cut will be a two-man musical that will capsulate all of musical theatre history in a single evening. Starting with the Greeks and finishing in the present, the show will comedically inform the audience, while paying homage to, the astonishing art form called musical theatre, using several outrageous conventions such as a game show, spoof, mimicry, and most importantly, drag. The show will also pose the question to everyone: with all the great literature already created, where is musical theatre headed, and who is going to bring us there? Writing A 16 Bar Cut will test the training I have received and my mastery of musical theatre as an art form. The show will demonstrate my understanding and passion for several components used by authors and actors alike to create a musical. Being that the show is a capsulation of all musical theatre, A 16 Bar Cut will show my true mastery of the history and literature of musical theatre. I will be forced to hone my skills of the collaborative process at a new level, as never having to truly execute them with such intensity before. The challenges that lay ahead will be seen not only in the performance aspect, but also in the creation of A 16 Bar Cut. Since musical theatre has an immense range in genre and style, the ability to technically master these styles and genres will prove to challenge me as a performer, as well as a writer. In the performance, there will be three main challenges: vocal qualities, dance techniques, and my acting craft. The vocal styles used in A 16 Bar Cut will test my capabilities as a singer to meet the demands needed to convey the original material used as it was initially intended. As a dancer, the specific movements and signatures of the many choreographers will challenge me to understand and be able to re-create these specifics for an audience. The character building will test me as an actor, starting with one through-lined character--a heightened half-brained juvenile form of myself--along with building approximately fifty auxiliary characters throughout the show. As a writer, there are two major challenges that I foresee. The first challenge is the arc of the show--needing to keep a steady through-line that will let the audience understand what is happening and follow the history. The second obstacle is making sure the audience understands the show. I may be finishing an M.F.A. in Musical Theatre, but not everyone will be. In fact, some audience members may not know anything about musical theatre. This challenge arises trying to make the show funny to everyone, not just musical theatre dorks. The Research and Analysis portion of my monograph document will follow the course of action laid out in the M.F.A. Thesis Guidelines. The (A) Research section will include the biographical information pertaining to the composers and lyricists involved in the selected materials. Librettists of specific book shows that we choose to utilize as it pertains to our show will also be included in this section. I will also include a brief subsection of each composer, lyricist, and librettist\u27s significance to musical theatre history. The (B) Structural Analysis section will discuss the structure and dramatic organization of how we choose to create A 16 Bar Cut. The (C) Analysis of the Role section will reveal how we employ the stock characters/ comedic duo of the straight man and funny man (i.e., Laurel & Hardy and Abbot & Costello). All other components outlined in the M.F.A. Thesis Guidelines will be included in my document

The Relationships Between Personality Types and Project Management Team Satisfaction

This research studies the relationships between personality types in Project Managers and Project Engineers and how they relate to project team satisfaction. Goals this research set out to accomplish include: finding relationships between personality types and team satisfaction, determining if heterogeneous or homogeneous team compositions yield greater levels of satisfaction, and determining if certain personality types influence team satisfaction more than others. In order to answer these goals, a specific study was conducted comparing two project teams composed of PMs and PEs. These teams were instructed to complete the NERIS Type Explorer® along with a Likert Scale questionnaire to self-assess their level of satisfaction with their respective team. In addition, participants were instructed to elaborate after answering each question to further explain their reasoning for each rating. After comparing the results of the NERIS Type Explorer® to the questionnaire, both project teams displayed similar levels of satisfaction while exhibiting different personality types and compositions. This result yielded no significant correlation between personality type preferences and team satisfaction. Though small, a relationship was discovered with the Mind personality facet where team A displayed higher levels of the extraverted preference along with higher levels of satisfaction with regards to communication and cooperation

The Effects Of Static Stretching Warm-Up Versus Dynamic Warm-Up On Sprint Swim Performance

Recent research has revealed that static stretching (SS) warm-ups may attenuate power performance compared to other warm-up protocols, but most studies have focused on dry land modalities. PURPOSE: To examine the effects of an SS warm-up versus a dynamic warm-up (DW) on sprint performance in competitive swimmers. Specifically, it was hypothesized that SS prior to a 50-meter sprint would attenuate results compared to DW. METHOD: Sixteen NCAA Division 1 swimmers (5 female, 11 male) participated. These swimmers had recently completed their collegiate season. In a randomized order crossover design, the participants swam a 50-meter freestyle sprint after two different warm-up protocols that were designed to mirror typical practice among competitive swimmers, while allowing any practically significant experimental effects from the SS versus DW contrasts to occur: Specifically, the warm-ups were Static Stretch + Swim (SS/S), and Dynamic Warm-up + Swim (DW/S). In each case the contrasting experimental warm-up exercises (nine static stretches versus nine dynamic movements) were immediately followed by a typical swimming warm-up (about 20-minutes). The two timed 50-meter sprints took place 5-minutes after the SS/S and DW/S warm-ups were completed, and they were conducted three days apart under simulated competitive conditions using standard starting commands, and electronic timing equipment. RESULTS: Separate analyses (paired t-tests) were conducted to test for treatment effects over the first 25 meters, the second 25 meters, and the overall 50-meter sprint time. There were no significant differences between mean times in any of those comparisons. Examination of individual data revealed that the number of swimmers who were slower after SS/S was approximately equal to the number slower after DW/S. CONCLUSION: Unlike the detrimental effects shown in other performance modalities, SS in warm-up did not attenuate sprint swimming performance in this study. It is possible that the swimming warm-up done subsequently to the SS or DW component may have blunted any effects of the SS. Thus, future research might minimize the swimming component of warm-up to allow any effects of SS versus DW to emerge, and it might be preferable to conduct the study during the swimmers\u27 competitive season

Master of Science

thesisCases of child abuse, specifically abusive head trauma (AHT) or shaken-baby syndrome (SBS), have long been associated clinically with retinal hemorrhages (RH). Previous research has shown that the vast majority (~85%) of AHT cases present with some type of RH. Traumatic RH is initiated by an external application of forces and accelerations to the head, but the mechanism by which this causes RH in infants is still unknown. The most prominent theory suggests that collagen-mediated adhesion between the vitreous and retina causes traction on the retina during rapid head rotation, damaging retinal blood vessels. To date, this theory has never been proven. In order to better understand the mechanisms of traumatic RH in infants, age-related changes of the vitreous and vitreoretinal interface were investigated. First, dynamic shear tests were conducted using a novel rheological interconversion technique to characterize the changes in material properties with developmental age of porcine vitreous. Next, scanning electron microscopy (SEM) and energy dispersive X-Ray spectroscopy (EDS) studies were performed on specimens from the vitreoretinal interface to quantitatively evaluate changes in collagen with age and in different regions of the eye. In dynamic shear, there was a statistically significant difference among the three age groups at varying shear rates (frequencies) for both storage (G′) and loss (G″) shear modulus. In particular, younger porcine vitreous had significantly higher (G′) and (G″) than vitreous from older animals. Given the unavoidable time degradation of vitreous, vi the interconversion technique used to characterize the porcine vitreous dynamic properties provided more reliable data over a wider range of frequencies (0.01 Hz - 1 Hz) than previous studies. SEM image analysis of the vitreoretinal interface resulted in a significantly higher percent collagen in eyes from 3- to 5-day-old piglets compared to 4-week-old piglets (p=0.002). Statistically significant regional differences were hindered by large variances due to charging artifacts and extraneous collagen from the vitreous body. The EDS analysis resulted in significant differences in carbon (p=0.009), nitrogen (p=0.025), silicon (p≤0.001), and sulfur (p=0.007) with respect to age. Regional significant differences were also found for sulfur (p=0.002)

Automating Software Development for Mobile Computing Platforms

Mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets have become ubiquitous in today\u27s computing landscape. These devices have ushered in entirely new populations of users, and mobile operating systems are now outpacing more traditional desktop systems in terms of market share. The applications that run on these mobile devices (often referred to as apps ) have become a primary means of computing for millions of users and, as such, have garnered immense developer interest. These apps allow for unique, personal software experiences through touch-based UIs and a complex assortment of sensors. However, designing and implementing high quality mobile apps can be a difficult process. This is primarily due to challenges unique to mobile development including change-prone APIs and platform fragmentation, just to name a few. in this dissertation we develop techniques that aid developers in overcoming these challenges by automating and improving current software design and testing practices for mobile apps. More specifically, we first introduce a technique, called Gvt, that improves the quality of graphical user interfaces (GUIs) for mobile apps by automatically detecting instances where a GUI was not implemented to its intended specifications. Gvt does this by constructing hierarchal models of mobile GUIs from metadata associated with both graphical mock-ups (i.e., created by designers using photo-editing software) and running instances of the GUI from the corresponding implementation. Second, we develop an approach that completely automates prototyping of GUIs for mobile apps. This approach, called ReDraw, is able to transform an image of a mobile app GUI into runnable code by detecting discrete GUI-components using computer vision techniques, classifying these components into proper functional categories (e.g., button, dropdown menu) using a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), and assembling these components into realistic code. Finally, we design a novel approach for automated testing of mobile apps, called CrashScope, that explores a given android app using systematic input generation with the intrinsic goal of triggering crashes. The GUI-based input generation engine is driven by a combination of static and dynamic analyses that create a model of an app\u27s GUI and targets common, empirically derived root causes of crashes in android apps. We illustrate that the techniques presented in this dissertation represent significant advancements in mobile development processes through a series of empirical investigations, user studies, and industrial case studies that demonstrate the effectiveness of these approaches and the benefit they provide developers