Agenda Setting: the Media’s Role in Abolishing the Death Penalty in New Jersey

In 1976, the Supreme Court federally reinstated the death penalty. New Jersey became the 37th state to reinstate the death penalty in 1982, and Gov. Christine Whitman signed the death warrant for John Martini Sr. in 1999. By 2006, the state had a moratorium on the death penalty. On Dec. 17, 2007 Gov. Jon Corzine signed the bill that abolished the death penalty in New Jersey, making it the first state to repeal the practice since it was reinstated in 1976. Scholars have conducted decades of research on the mass media’s influence on public opinion. The following is a content analysis study to look at how agenda setting can influence public opinion and lead to policy change. Specifically, the study discusses how newspapers reported the death penalty before its abolition in New Jersey. Through agenda setting, New Jersey print media led the public to think about the death penalty, which caused policy makers to look at change in legislation and led to the abolition

The history of residential lighting standards

The purpose of this study was to trace the history of residential lighting standards from 1906 to 1970 and to identify the research methods and instruments used in establishing: present day lighting standards with consideration being given to the quantity and quality of lighting. The procedure was to study articles, for the most part in the Illuminating Engineering Journals, pertaining to research related to recommendations for lighting standards for visual tasks in the home, noting the quantity and quality of lighting. The literature reviewed was concerned mainly with (1) the bases of the Illuminating Engineering Society standards for lighting as stated in the handbooks, (2) the test conditions such as room size, subjects, types of lighting and visual tasks, (3) the kinds of research instruments developed to measure the quantity and quality of lighting and (4) changes in footcandle recommendations for various residential tasks. Two methods of research for illumination were used, the direct and indirect. The direct method for illumination research was used from 1906 to 1950 in which the investigator selected a task, a set of task conditions and measure of performance. From 1906 to 1917, there were few research investigations concerning the quantity and quality of lighting. Light sources were poorly developed and whatever footcandles they provided established the levels to be recommended

PRODUCTIVELY SCALING HARDWARE DESIGNS OVER INCREASING RESOURCES USING A SYSTEMATIC DESIGN ANALYSIS APPROACH

As processor development shifts from strict single core frequency scaling to het- erogeneous resource scaling two important considerations require evaluation. First, how to design systems with an increasing amount of heterogeneous resources, and second, how to maintain a designer’s productivity as the number of possible con- figurations grows. Therefore, it is necessary to determine what useful information can be gathered from existing designs to help predict or identify a design’s potential scalability, as well as, identifying which routine tasks can be automated to improve a designer’s productivity. Moreover, once this information is collected, how can this information be conveyed to the designer such that it can be used to increase overall productivity when implementing the design over increasing amounts of resources? This research looks at various approaches to analyze designs and attempts to distribute an application efficiently across a heterogeneous cluster of computing re- sources through the use of a Systematic Design Analysis flow and an assortment of productivity tools. These tools provide the designer with projections on the amount of resources needed to scale an existing design to a specified performance, as well as, projecting the performance based on a specified amount of resources. This is accomplished through the combination of static HDL profiling, component synthesis resource utilization, and runtime performance monitoring. For evaluation, four case studies are presented to demonstrate the proposed flow’s scalability on a small scale cluster of FPGAs. The results are highly favorable, providing orders of magnitude speedup with minimal intervention from the designer

Developing a child health model : a prospective study of maternal health beliefs and utilization of preventive infant health care services

The purpose of this study was to investigate the relationship among expectant mothers' health beliefs, utilization of preventive health care services, and infant health status. The participants were 75 expectant mothers recruited in their third trimester of pregnancy from public and private health care provider sites. Group 1 mothers had health insurance and received prenatal care through a private obstetric clinic. Group 2 mothers received public aid and obtained prenatal services through their county health department. A Maternal Health Belief Questionnaire (MHBQ) was developed for the purposes of this study. The MHBQ assessed the mother's perceptions about: (a) the perceived vulnerability of her unborn child to health threats experienced in infancy, (b) the perceived severity of each of these health threats, (c) the perceived effectiveness of preventive prenatal and infant health care services, (d) the perceived barriers to her seeking preventive health care for her child, and (e) the perceived locus of control with regard to the health of her unborn child

Counselor characteristics and situational factors as related to rated importance and practice of counseling and consulting processes by elementary counselors in North Carolina

The purpose of this study was to identify and describe counselor characteristics and situational factors which demonstrate a relationship to the types of counselors who value and use consultation and counseling processes in their elementary guidance programs. These questions were posed: 1) Which counselors prefer counseling and which prefer consulting processes? 2) Who actually uses counseling and who uses consulting activities

Collectivism vs. Individualism in a Wiki World: Librarians Respond to Jaron Lanier's Essay

Jaron Lanier’s essay Digital Maoism: The Hazards of the New Online Collectivism is a self-described rant of the dangers of the hive mentality in suppressing individual human intelligence as demonstrated in online resources such as Wikipedia and MySpace. He sees merit in collective decision-making and problem-solving if evaluation is uncontroversial, but argues that individuals are essential in providing judgment, taste, and user experiences in many situations. Lanier’s essay appeared in the online progressive publication Edge and received responses from a variety of technologists, academics, and writers. In this Balance Point column, four academic librarians provide a library public services viewpoint in responding to Lanier’s essay

Now-Gen Resources for Next-Gen Librarians

Paper presented at Biennial meeting of the North Carolina Library Association, Hickory, North Carolin

The New Face of Reference

Paper presented at the Computers in Libraries annual conference, Washington, District of Columbi

Talking Through It:Using Student-to-Student Interviews and Brainstorming Activities for Facilitating Critical Inquiry

Poster for The Innovative Library Classroom (TILC). Talking Through It:Using Student-to-Student Interviews and Brainstorming Activities for Facilitating Critical Inquir

Subject Liaison's Guide to the Backroom: What Every New Liaison Needs to Know About Technical Services Processes

Paper presented at the 34th Annual Charleston Conference, Charleston, South Carolin