| Conference Presentations |
"I can be good at it if I like it": Adolescent girl writers
(Hannah
Chai)
There is a common perception that girls are good at writing. This may lead educators to overlook girls who may not be engaged writers. This study examined the writing engagement of three sixth grade girls and how their writing self-perception affected their attitudes in a writing classroom. Using a qualitative case study methodology, the three main themes that arose were: the importance of writing tasks, the influence of reading interests on writing, and time to write. Although these implications are important, the participants of this study alluded to a greater underlying factor; that of writing volition, i.e. desire to write or not write. Volition was the key that drove writing motivation and engagement of the three adolescent girls. Volition guided students’ self-perception by directly affecting their attitudes towards writing.
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Unleashing voices: Diverse female doctoral students transition experiences into academia
(Hannah
Chai)
Entering the doctoral program poses major challenges and obstacles; however, for those from culturally different backgrounds, the challenges and obstacles are exacerbated. Beyond the regular gatekeeping mechanisms and acclimating to the discourse of academia, students from culturally different backgrounds may face additional challenges including invisibility, isolation, devaluation of identity, and being stereotyped. Consequently, female students from diverse cultural backgrounds incongruent with the school's culture may experience the sense of being imposters in academia. We share the perspectives of three culturally diverse female doctoral students. The voices reflect the respective culturally rooted paradigms of a Filipina American, a Korean American, and an Appalachian American. The diverse students' voices express experiences of navigating and negotiating the culture of academia. Through narrative storytelling, we unleash our voices and share our identities to affirm and validate the existence of our experiences as who WE are in academia.
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Commitment, Climate and Recruitment: Recruiting and Retaining Minority Faculty in Higher Education
(Hannah
Chai)
This paper describes the commitment, climate and recruitment strategies used by one teacher education department to successfully recruit and retain faculty of color and discusses the results of the findings of surveys and opened-ended reflections highlighting the experiences the minority faculty had themselves as well as impact that increasing minority faculty had on all of the department. Programs were created to: (1) foster the development of quality prospective faculty; and (2) to enculturate and support the faculty in their work. The findings demonstrate that commitment of leadership, creating an affirming climate, and developing active recruitment strategies, has positive results that benefit everyone—the faculty of color, their colleagues, and their students.
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Girls Opinions Wanted (and Needed)
(hara
bastas)
Creating a narrative of girls' voices must continuously place the girls themselves in the center of the dialogue. It is only then that the everyday experiences of girls in similar locations can be situated within a systemic context. Girls around the United States continue to be systematically disadvantaged in their intersectional identities and without positive support systems to counteract the inequities, the chances to "grow strong girls" becomes dismal. Within the Greater Cincinnati area, discrepancies exist in whether girls feel connected to their schools and neighborhoods/communiites, particularly between African-American and European-American girls and between urban, suburban and rural locales.
Through the use of four focus groups with about 30 girls, stories were shared about what being a girl meant within one's family, school and friends. As a followup to "PULSE: A Study of the Status of Women and Girls in Greater Cincinnati" (2005) and part of "Social Bonds and the Relative Risk of Deviance and Distress Among Cincinnati-Area Girls" (2009) the girls provided keen insight into their social networks of support (or lack thereof) and demonstrated the significance of incorporating girl children and youth in academic discourse. The perspectives offered from the girls' provide the basis in supporting and even creating programs that focus on girls in the Greater Cincinnati Area to ensure that girls' are not only part of a research agenda, but also part of a community agenda for social change.
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Real-Time Mobile Video Streaming using Wavelet Transformation and Run-Length Coding
(Ngozi
Uti)
This work presents a core element of a mobile video streaming application that is able to stream live video from cell phones. Due to the limited resources available on mobile phones and the demands of real-time requirements, computational simplicity and efficiency are critical. To the best of the author’s knowledge real-time mobile streaming of video on commercially available cell phones has not yet been studied. This paper shows how the careful selection of video compression components can be used to strike a delicate balance between computational complexity and utilizing the limited resources available on cell phones. Although optimality is never claimed, a method of streaming real-time video of 15fps has been developed. 5-3 wavelet transformation and a proposed subband aligned integer run-length encoding (SAIRLE) is used for compressing wavelet coefficients. The result is a new and efficient encoding technique suitable for compressing live video streams originating from cell phones.
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Efficient Parallel Algorithm for the Mean Shift Clustering Technique
(Ngozi
Uti)
This work presents an efficient algorithm for distributing tasks to processors for data clustering in a distributed-memory parallel computer with an emphasis on clustering algorithms which blur data points as the algorithm progresses. Parallelizing clustering algorithms which rely on the blurring technique present an additional challenge because these algorithms expect all data to be in memory at the same time and the work load is dynamic. To take advantage of the power of parallel computing, an efficient algorithm is needed to balance the work load among all processors while maximizing processor utilization and minimizing inter-processor communication. This work describes the design and implementation of a parallel algorithm which uses data-parallelism to create a parallel mean shift clustering technique as a case study.
Theoretical analysis and experiments show that the proposed algorithm minimizes inter-processor communication while maximizing processor utilization. The clustering results are comparable with the sequential mean shift technique.
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Discriminative effects of SR 141716A in rhesus monkeys treated with 2 mg/kg/day of delta-9-THC
(Maryse
Amin)
One strategy for examining drug dependence involves training agonist-dependent animals to discriminate an appropriate antagonist. This study has begun to characterize the discriminative stimulus effects of SR 141716A (1 mg/kg) in monkeys receiving 2 mg/kg/day of delta-9-THC. In addition to SR 141716A, the cannabinoid antagonists AM 251 and SLV 326 occasioned high levels of responding on the SR 141716A lever, whereas midazolam, triazolam, cocaine, ketamine and morphine did not. Acute pretreatment with delta-9-THC, in addition to the dose of delta-9-THC administered daily, attenuated the SR 141716A discriminative stimulus. In addition, the cannabinoid agonists CP 55940 and WIN 55212-2 attenuated the discriminative stimulus effects of SR 141716A. Morphine attenuated the effects of SR 141716A in some monkeys, whereas triazolam did not. This study demonstrates the utility of drug discrimination for evaluating the effects of cannabinoid antagonists in agonist-treated animals. The discrimination is sensitive to cannabinoid action and is consistent with cannabinoid withdrawal, and appears to have utility for evaluating drugs that do (cannabinoid agonists and morphine) and do not (a benzodiazepine) modulate cannabinoid withdrawal. Supported by USPHS grants DA 15468 and DA 19222.
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Carrie Chapman Catt: Persuasive strategies of a suffragist
(Dustin
Wood)
Carrie Chapman Catt, best known as the suffragist organizer and president of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, was a second-generation suffragist in the struggle for women’s equality. This paper provides a biographical sketch of Catt’s early life and then highlights her major contributions to the women’s suffrage movement up to the ratification of the 19th Amendment in 1920. Next, this analysis examines the persuasive and rhetorical strategies Catt exercised throughout her rhetorical career. Finally, this report argues that Catt’s persuasive strategies illustrate tenants of the Social Judgment Theory and that Source Factors contributed to her success as a persuasive rhetor.
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Speaking with Purpose: Theories of Behavioral Intention and the Persuasive Strategies of the Women's Suffrage Movement.
(Dustin
Wood)
This paper specifically considers the persuasive strategies of the women’s suffrage movement. Although scholars have long been fascinated with the lives and rhetoric of leading suffragists, little attention has been given to the persuasive strategies, in terms of persuasion theories, implemented in suffragist communication. Specifically, the application of theories of behavioral intention is absent from the research conducted by communication scholars in the suffrage movement. The work that rhetoricians have done about the suffrage advocates and their communication is useful, but it is incomplete given the rich possibilities the suffrage movement offers for learning about the application of persuasion theories.
Thus, this essay aims to respond to two deficiencies in the literature: too narrow an application of the theories of behavioral intention and too limited a consideration of the women’s suffrage movement. This paper begins with a brief summary of the Theory of Reasoned Action and the Theory of Planned Behavior. Next, this paper reviews the literature on each theory in terms of their heurism in communication research. Last, this paper argues for the value theories of behavioral intention hold for understanding the women’s suffrage movement by examining the persuasive strategies of suffragists Matilda Joslyn Gage and Lucretia Coffin Mott; this paper argues that Gage and Mott are each excellent exemplars for using the model of behavioral intention differently for the same persuasive goal.
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A Study Involving Global Climate change, Meteorology (wind behavior) and Ground Level Ozone Concentration
(Abhishek
LNU)
Ozone in stratosphere provides protection from sun’s harmful rays but at ground level it can trigger a variety of health problem and has detrimental effects on plants and ecosystems. Ground level ozone forms more readily in hot, sunny weather and thus called summertime air pollutant. High ozone levels can occur anywhere: wind can carry ozone and the pollutants that form it (NOx and VOCs), hundreds of miles away from original sources. Changes in emissions as well as weather patterns contribute to yearly differences in ozone concentrations from region to region.
From the hourly ozone data of Marion county Indianapolis from 1972-2007, we first converted individual monthly pdf data into MS excel spreadsheet. After obtaining monthly MS excel sheets, we pasted it into the template which converts 1 hr readings into 8 hr average and tells which readings exceed .08 ppm level.
Then hourly wind speed and direction data was pasted alongside this violation column and we observe what the wind speed and direction was at the time of a particular violation.
Then we plotted (wind speed Vs No. of violations) and (wind direction Vs no. of violations) graphs. We observe that maximum violations occur when wind speed range is 2- 4 m/s and wind direction is around 240 degrees (SW). This seems reasonable because of location of various pollution sources (coal fired power plants and interstate highway) in SW direction to monitoring station.
Observing the ozone violation frequency over last 35 years it is found that, number of violations are decreasing. Numbers of violations were of the order of 120 in early 80s, then got reduced to around 50 number mark in early 90s and are under 10 since past 4 years. This reduction probably is due to ever stringent rules and regulation by authorities and awareness in industry peoples.
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