California Adolescents Increasingly Inactive

Explores the health benefits of regular exercise; the extent to which adolescents in California are getting adequate levels of physical activity; and factors that affect high rates of inactivity. Provides policy recommendations

Low-Income Adolescents Face More Barriers to Healthy Weight

Examines the causes behind the higher prevalence of obesity among low-income adolescents, including unhealthy food environments, few opportunities for physical activity, and irregular family meals. Makes policy recommendations to address such disparities

An Examination of the Relationship Between Computer Anxiety, Communication Apprehension and Student Experiences With Electronic Mail

Electronic mail (email) communication is fast becoming ubiquitous in the workplace and on the university campus (Garton and Wellman, 1995). Its wide availability and perceived usefulness make it a particularly attractive software tool for inclusion as a course instructional method. However, there has been little principled investigation into how this blending of computer technology and communication medium may be perceived by the users of such technology when integrated into a course as an instructional method1. This research is aimed at uncovering certain characteristics that might influence students\u27 experiences with this medium. We argue that due to the nature of the medium communication and computer its use will be affected by both computer anxiety and communication apprehension. To complicate matters further, the typical distinction between written or oral communication apprehension is likely to be less clear when we examine email. In this paper, we discuss our rationale for the research, the research question and propositions, current project status, and the potential contributions of this stream of research

Factors Influencing Adoption And Non-Adoption Of Cyberinfrastructure By The Research Community

Technology adoption has received a great deal of research attention in information systems. While the results are quite consistent in workplace settings, only limited attention has been paid to assessing the conditions – e.g., adopters, context – that influence relationships in existing models. Cyberinfrastructure -- integrated computing, storage, and collaborative infrastructure – represents an under explored technology. Likewise, the adopters of this technology, i.e., researchers, represent an under explored audience for technology adoption. In order to understand the factors influencing adoption of this technology by these users, we employ an open-ended interview among members of a scientific research community. The goal of the interview is to elicit researchers’ beliefs in order to understand the reasons they do and do not choose to participate in cyberinfrastructure projects. The focus of this research is one particular cyberinfrastructure known as the iPlant Collaborative. The results of this research-in-progress will contribute to the literature on technology adoption and provide valuable guidance for research institutes and governments that fund large-scale cyberinfrastructure projects to support multi-disciplinary collaborative research

The Evolving Influence of Diversity and Media in Virtual Organizations

Virtual organizations are important to enable collaboration and enhance interaction among a diverse set of people regardless of their temporal and spatial dispersion. Some research has assumed that communication media will mask traditional elements of diversity while other research suggests mediated teams simply pay attention to different cues. The relationships among the media, team member diversity (broadly defined) and outcomes have not been examined. This research in progress seeks to understand how various components of diversity enhance, inhibit, or are overcome in virtual organizations. The goal of this study is to understand how virtual organizations evolve over time, with a particular eye toward understanding the role of diversity in this process, thus enabling us to identify the conditions under which virtual organizations will be successful. Guided by social change, diversity, attribution, and media theories, we propose a theoretical framework with a set of research questions and hypotheses

Meeting Outcomes Assessment: An Opportunity for Partnership

English faculty at Florida State College at Jacksonville were facing increasing frustration in the fight against student plagiarism. The Letters Council began to explore ways to assess student learning outcomes across the college on the topic of plagiarism. It was imperative to reach not only face-to-face students, but also online, and hybrid classes. In the fall of 2015 the library subscribed to the ProQuest Research Companion database which is a one-stop resource for guiding students through the research process. Through short videos organized into nine learning modules covering finding information, evaluating information, and using information, students complete pre and post assessments to evaluate their information literacy skills. Several faculty members were invited to preview the ProQuest Research Companion database and asked to field test it in their classes. When the English faculty began to discuss possible assessments for improving students’ use of sources, those faculty familiar with ProQuest Research invited the librarians to present the product to the Letters Council, the body responsible for writing outcomes and choosing assessment methods for writing faculty. After a presentation by the Executive Dean of the Library Learning Commons to the Letters Council faculty, the decision was made to collaborate to produce an assessment of students’ research skills and responsible uses of sources using Module 8: How Do I Avoid Plagiarism and Find My Own Voice?. This presentation will cover the discussion and collaboration between faculty and librarians regarding the Research Companion assessment and the need to develop an in-house assessment product better suited to faculty needs

Communication in a Wired World: Understanding Receiver Perceptions

The ability to communicate effectively is a key skill for all employees. While extensive research exists regarding the characteristics of competent oral communicators, there has yet to be systematic research on the characteristics of competent electronic communicators. A new set of rules has emerged in this electronic arena, and whether those rules have transferred to the corporate environment or not remains to be seen. This paper discusses an exploratory study to identify the characteristics of email communication and the evaluations those characteristics engender. The study employs an on-line survey in which subjects are asked to read and respond to a series of four emails from the same general context. The messages are designed to be consistent with established “norms” of electronic communication, and semantic differential scales are used to assess the degree to which the different forms evoke personality evaluations in the receiver

Conceptualizing the IT Artifact for MIS Research

The notion of the information technology (IT) artifact has received a great deal of attention, particularly since Benbasat and Zmud’s (2003) call for it to be the core of the information systems discipline. Yet, little work has focused on defining and discussing the IT artifact in a way that can facilitate consistent treatment across studies. In this paper, we develop a taxonomy of the IT artifact. The taxonomy is derived from literature on general systems theory and Akerman and Tyree’s (2006) architectural ontology. We provide a preliminary explication of the taxonomy using four different systems as examples. We also discuss the iterative approach we will take to develop the taxonomy more completely. Our objective is to develop a taxonomy that will provide a language for IS researchers to use when discussing the IT artifact

Applications of CFD and visualization techniques

In this paper, three applications are presented to illustrate current techniques for flow calculation and visualization. The first two applications use a commercial computational fluid dynamics (CFD) code, FLUENT, performed on a Cray Y-MP. The results are animated with the aid of data visualization software, apE. The third application simulates a particulate deposition pattern using techniques inspired by developments in nonlinear dynamical systems. These computations were performed on personal computers

Kowledge Management and Organizational Learning: An Overview of the Mini Track

This paper provides an introduction to the knowledge management and organizational learning mini track. We begin with a discussion of how the mini track has evolved over time, which is followed by an overview of knowledge management and organizational learning. This is followed by a discussion of some of the pressing research issues in the area. This overview concludes with a discussion of the journals and conferences associated with knowledge management and organizational learning