Community college faculty's teaching social networks and their implications for librarians

Collaboration between faculty and librarians is an important topic of discussion and research among academic librarians. These partnerships between faculty and librarians are vital for enabling students to become lifelong learners through their information literacy education. This research developed an understanding of academic collaborators by analyzing a community college faculty's teaching social networks. A teaching social network, an original term generated in this study, is comprised of communications that influence faculty when they design and deliver their courses. The communication may be formal (e.g., through scholarly journals and professional development activities) and informal (e.g., through personal communication) through their network elements. Examples of the elements of a teaching social network may be department faculty, administration, librarians, professional development, and students. This research asked 'What is the nature of faculty's teaching social networks and what are the implications for librarians?' This study moves forward the existing research on collaboration, information literacy, and social network analysis. It provides both faculty and librarians with added insight into their existing and potential relationships. This research was undertaken using mixed methods. Social network analysis was the quantitative data collection methodology and the interview method was the qualitative technique. For the social network analysis data, a survey was sent to full-time faculty at Las Positas College, a community college, in California. The survey gathered the data and described the teaching social networks for faculty with respect to their teaching methods and content taught. Semi-structured interviews were conducted following the survey with a sub-set of survey respondents to understand why specific elements were included in their teaching social networks and to learn of ways for librarians to become an integral part of the teaching social networks. The majority of the faculty respondents were moderately influenced by the elements of their network except the majority of the potentials were weakly influenced by the elements in their network in their content taught. The elements with the most influence on both teaching methods and content taught were students, department faculty, professional development, and former graduate professors and coursework. The elements with the least influence on both aspects were public or academic librarians, and social media. The most popular roles for the elements were conversations about teaching, sharing ideas, tips for teaching, insights into teaching, suggestions for ways of teaching, and how to engage students. Librarians' weakly influenced faculty in their teaching methods and their content taught. The motivating factors for collaboration with librarians were that students learned how to research, students' research projects improved, faculty saved time by having librarians provide the instruction to students, and faculty built strong working relationships with librarians. The challenges of collaborating with librarians were inadequate teaching techniques used when librarians taught research orientations and lack of time. Ways librarians can be more integral in faculty's teaching social networks included: more workshops for faculty, more proactive interaction with faculty, and more one-on-one training sessions for faculty. Some of the recommendations for the librarians from this study were develop a strong rapport with faculty, librarians should build their services in information literacy from the point of view of the faculty instead of from the librarian perspective, use staff development funding to attend conferences and workshops to improve their teaching, develop more training sessions for faculty, increase marketing efforts of the librarian's instructional services, and seek grant opportunities to increase funding for the library. In addition, librarians and faculty should review the definitions of information literacy and move from a skills based interpretation to a learning process.

Distributed low-power image processing in wireless sensor networks for intelligent video surveillance applications

Distributed Wireless Smart Camera (DWSC) network is a special type of Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) that processes captured images in a distributed manner. While image processing on DWSCs sees a great potential for growth, with its applications possessing a vast practical application domain such as security surveillance and health care, it suffers from tremendous constraints. In addition to the limitations of conventional WSNs, image processing on DWSCs requires more computational power, bandwidth and energy that presents significant challenges for large scale deployments. This dissertation has developed a number of algorithms that are highly scalable, portable, energy efficient and performance efficient, with considerations of practical constraints imposed by the hardware and the nature of WSN. More specifically, these algorithms tackle the problems of multi-object tracking and localisation in distributed wireless smart camera net- works and optimal camera configuration determination. Addressing the first problem of multi-object tracking and localisation requires solving a large array of sub-problems. The sub-problems that are discussed in this dissertation are calibration of internal parameters, multi-camera calibration for localisation and object handover for tracking. These topics have been covered extensively in computer vision literatures, however new algorithms must be invented to accommodate the various constraints introduced and required by the DWSC platform. A technique has been developed for the automatic calibration of low-cost cameras which are assumed to be restricted in their freedom of movement to either pan or tilt movements. Camera internal parameters, including focal length, principal point, lens distortion parameter and the angle and axis of rotation, can be recovered from a minimum set of two images of the camera, provided that the axis of rotation between the two images goes through the camera's optical centre and is parallel to either the vertical (panning) or horizontal (tilting) axis of the image. For object localisation, a novel approach has been developed for the calibration of a network of non-overlapping DWSCs in terms of their ground plane homographies, which can then be used for localising objects. In the proposed approach, a robot travels through the camera network while updating its position in a global coordinate frame, which it broadcasts to the cameras. The cameras use this, along with the image plane location of the robot, to compute a mapping from their image planes to the global coordinate frame. This is combined with an occupancy map generated by the robot during the mapping process to localised objects moving within the network. In addition, to deal with the problem of object handover between DWSCs of non-overlapping fields of view, a highly-scalable, distributed protocol has been designed. Cameras that follow the proposed protocol transmit object descriptions to a selected set of neighbours that are determined using a predictive forwarding strategy. The received descriptions are then matched at the subsequent camera on the object's path using a probability maximisation process with locally generated descriptions. The second problem of camera placement emerges naturally when these pervasive devices are put into real use. The locations, orientations, lens types etc. of the cameras must be chosen in a way that the utility of the network is maximised (e.g. maximum coverage) while user requirements are met. To deal with this, a statistical formulation of the problem of determining optimal camera configurations has been introduced and a Trans-Dimensional Simulated Annealing (TDSA) algorithm has been proposed to effectively solve the problem.

The Arab Spring and social media audiences : English and Arabic Twitter users and their networks

Although popular media narratives about the role of social media in driving the events of the 2011 “Arab Spring” are likely to overstate the impact of Facebook and Twitter on these uprisings, it is nonetheless true that protests and unrest in countries from Tunisia to Syria generated a substantial amount of social media activity. On Twitter alone, several millions of tweets containing the hashtags #libya or #egypt were generated during 2011, both by directly affected citizens of these countries and by onlookers from further afield. What remains unclear, though, is the extent to which there was any direct interaction between these two groups (especially considering potential language barriers between them). Building on hashtag data sets gathered between January and November 2011, this article compares patterns of Twitter usage during the popular revolution in Egypt and the civil war in Libya. Using custom-made tools for processing “big data,” we examine the volume of tweets sent by English-, Arabic-, and mixed-language Twitter users over time and examine the networks of interaction (variously through @replying, retweeting, or both) between these groups as they developed and shifted over the course of these uprisings. Examining @reply and retweet traffic, we identify general patterns of information flow between the English- and Arabic-speaking sides of the Twittersphere and highlight the roles played by users bridging both language spheres.

The influence of cellular source on periodontal regeneration using calcium phosphate coated polycaprolactone scaffold supported cell sheets

Cell-based therapy is considered a promising approach to achieving predictable periodontal regeneration. In this study, the regenerative potential of cell sheets derived from different parts of the periodontium (gingival connective tissue, alveolar bone and periodontal ligament) were investigated in an athymic rat periodontal defect model. Periodontal ligament (PDLC), alveolar bone (ABC) and gingival margin-derived cells (GMC) were obtained from human donors. The osteogenic potential of the primary cultures was demonstrated in vitro. Cell sheets supported by a calcium phosphate coated melt electrospun polycaprolactone (CaP-PCL) scaffold were transplanted to denuded root surfaces in surgically created periodontal defects, and allowed to heal for 1 and 4 weeks. The CaP-PCL scaffold alone was able to promote alveolar bone formation within the defect after 4 weeks. The addition of ABC and PDLC sheets resulted in significant periodontal attachment formation. The GMC sheets did not promote periodontal regeneration on the root surface and inhibited bone formation within the CaP-PCL scaffold. In conclusion, the combination of either PDLC or ABC sheets with a CaP-PCL scaffold could promote periodontal regeneration, but ABC sheets were not as effective as PDLC sheets in promoting new attachment formation.

ACE research vignette 026 : Do Entrepreneurs’ Personal Networks Influence Small Firm Performance?

This series of research vignettes is aimed at sharing current and interesting research findings from our team of international Entrepreneurship researchers. This vignette, written by Dr. Rene Bakker, examines the evidence on the effects of a entrepreneurs’ personal networks on small firm performance, and the factors that moderate this relationship.

Characteristics of Bangladeshi corporate networks

Over the past 40 years, Bangladesh has been undergoing economic reforms and institutional transitions to a market economy. An important product of this strategic transition has been the emergence of interlocking directorates, where a director sits on multiple directorate boards of corporations. Given this background, this thesis seeks to examine the attributes of the corporate network of interlocking directorships in Bangladesh. To date, the study of interlocking directorates has concentrated on Western economies. This study provides the results from a systematic exploration of the corporate network of Bangladesh based on data drawn from 100 largest listed companies in 2010.

Diffusion tensor of water in partially aligned fibre networks

Monte Carlo simulations were used to investigate the relationship between the morphological characteristics and the diffusion tensor (DT) of partially aligned networks of cylindrical fibres. The orientation distributions of the fibres in each network were approximately uniform within a cone of a given semi-angle (θ0). This semi-angle was used to control the degree of alignment of the fibres. The networks studied ranged from perfectly aligned (θ0 = 0) to completely disordered (θ0 = 90°). Our results are qualitatively consistent with previous numerical models in the overall behaviour of the DT. However, we report a non-linear relationship between the fractional anisotropy (FA) of the DT and collagen volume fraction, which is different to the findings from previous work. We discuss our results in the context of diffusion tensor imaging of articular cartilage. We also demonstrate how appropriate diffusion models have the potential to enable quantitative interpretation of the experimentally measured diffusion-tensor FA in terms of collagen fibre alignment distributions.

Mussel-inspired bioceramics with self-assembled Ca-P/polydopamine composite nanolayer : preparation, formation mechanism, improved cellular bioactivity and osteogenic differentiation of bone marrow stromal cells

The nanostructured surface of biomaterials plays an important role in improving their in vitro cellular bioactivity as well as stimulating in vivo tissue regeneration. Inspired by the mussel’s adhesive versatility, which is thought to be due to the plaque–substrate interface being rich in 3,4-dihydroxy-L-phenylalamine (DOPA) and lysine amino acids, in this study we developed a self-assembly method to prepare a uniform calcium phosphate (Ca-P)/polydopamine composite nanolayer on the surface of b-tricalcium phosphate (b-TCP) bioceramics by soaking b-TCP bioceramics in Tris–dopamine solution. It was found that the addition of dopamine, reaction temperature and reaction time are three key factors inducing the formation of a uniform Ca-P/polydopamine composite nanolayer. The formation mechanism of a Ca-P/polydopamine composite nanolayer involved two important steps: (i) the addition of dopamine to Tris–HCl solution decreases the pH value and accelerates Ca and P ionic dissolution from the crystal boundaries of b-TCP ceramics; (ii) dopamine is polymerized to form self-assembled polydopamine film and, at the same time, nanosized Ca-P particles are mineralized with the assistance of polydopamine, in which the formation of polydopamine occurs simultaneously with Ca-P mineralization (formation of nanosized microparticles composed of calcium phosphate-based materials), and finally a self-assembled Ca-P/polydopamine composite nanolayer forms on the surface of the b-TCP ceramics. Furthermore, the formed self-assembled Ca-P/polydopamine composite nanolayer significantly enhances the surface roughness and hydrophilicity of b-TCP ceramics, and stimulates the attachment, proliferation, alkaline phosphate (ALP) activity and bone-related gene expression (ALP, OCN, COL1 and Runx2) of human bone marrow stromal cells. Our results suggest that the preparation of self-assembled Ca-P/polydopamine composite nanolayers is a viable method to modify the surface of biomaterials by significantly improving their surface physicochemical properties and cellular bioactivity for bone regeneration application.

Honeycomb nanogold networks with highly active sites

The formation of macroporous honeycomb gold using an electrochemically generated hydrogen bubble template is described. The synthesis procedure induces the formation of highly active surfaces with enhanced electrocatalytic and surface enhanced Raman scattering properties.

From science to management : using Bayesian networks to learn about Lyngbya

Toxic blooms of Lyngbya majuscula occur in coastal areas worldwide and have major ecological, health and economic consequences. The exact causes and combinations of factors which lead to these blooms are not clearly understood. Lyngbya experts and stakeholders are a particularly diverse group, including ecologists, scientists, state and local government representatives, community organisations, catchment industry groups and local fishermen. An integrated Bayesian Network approach was developed to better understand and model this complex environmental problem, identify knowledge gaps, prioritise future research and evaluate management options.

Tangled Webs : Using Bayesian Networks in the Fight Against Infection

Bayesian networks (BNs) provide a statistical modelling framework which is ideally suited for modelling the many factors and components of complex problems such as healthcare-acquired infections. The methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) organism is particularly troublesome since it is resistant to standard treatments for Staph infections. Overcrowding and understa�ng are believed to increase infection transmission rates and also to inhibit the effectiveness of disease control measures. Clearly the mechanisms behind MRSA transmission and containment are very complicated and control strategies may only be e�ective when used in combination. BNs are growing in popularity in general and in medical sciences in particular. A recent Current Content search of the number of published BN journal articles showed a fi�ve fold increase in general and a six fold increase in medical and veterinary science from 2000 to 2009. This chapter introduces the reader to Bayesian network (BN) modelling and an iterative modelling approach to build and test the BN created to investigate the possible role of high bed occupancy on transmission of MRSA while simultaneously taking into account other risk factors.

Enterprise social networks : a business model perspective

Enterprise Social Networks continue to be adopted by organisations looking to increase collaboration between employees, customers and industry partners. Offering a varied range of features and functionality, this technology can be distinguished by the underlying business models that providers of this software deploy. This study identifies and describes the different business models through an analysis of leading Enterprise Social Networks: Yammer, Chatter, SharePoint, Connections, Jive, Facebook and Twitter. A key contribution of this research is the identification of consumer and corporate models as extreme approaches. These findings align well with research on the adoption of Enterprise Social Networks that has discussed bottom-up and top-down approaches. Of specific interest are hybrid models that wrap a corporate model within a consumer model and may, therefore, provide synergies on both models. From a broader perspective, this can be seen as the merging of the corporate and consumer markets for IT products and services.

Multiscale investigation of microfilament networks disruption in living cells

Actin is the most abundantly distributed protein in living cells which plays critical roles in the cell interior force generation and transmission. The fracture mechanism of microfilament networks, whose principle component is actin, would provide insights which can contribute to the understandings of self-protective characters of cytoskeleton. In this study, molecular simulations are conducted to investigate the molecular mechanisms of disruption of microfilament networks from the viewpoint of biophysics. By employing a coarse-grained (CG) model of actin filament networks, we focused on the ultimate strength and crack growth mode of microfilament networks that have dependency on the crack length. It can be found that, the fracture mechanism of microfilament network has dependency on the structural properties of microfilament networks. The structure flaws marginally change the strength of microfilament networks which would explain the self-protective characters of cytoskeleton.

Sub-cellular localization of membrane proteins

In eukaryotes, numerous complex sub-cellular structures exist. The majority of these are delineated by membranes. Many proteins are trafficked to these in order to be able to carry out their correct physiological function. Assigning the sub-cellular location of a protein is of paramount importance to biologists in the elucidation of its role and in the refinement of knowledge of cellular processes by tracing certain activities to specific organelles. Membrane proteins are a key set of proteins as these form part of the boundary of the organelles and represent many important functions such as transporters, receptors, and trafficking. They are, however, some of the most challenging proteins to work with due to poor solubility, a wide concentration range within the cell and inaccessibility to many of the tools employed in proteomics studies. This review focuses on membrane proteins with particular emphasis on sub-cellular localization in terms of methodologies that can be used to determine the accurate location of membrane proteins to organelles. We also discuss what is known about the membrane protein cohorts of major organelles.