International student complaint behaviour: Understanding how East-Asian business and management students respond to dissatisfaction during their university experience

The higher education sector is characterised by intense global competition for international students. This is driving universities to place greater priority on the student experience and, in particular, student satisfaction and retention. However, an under-researched area is student complaint behaviour. By understanding how students react to poor experiences; the likely impact on the learning and teaching experience, satisfaction ratings and ultimately international student recruitment can be assessed, and appropriate strategies implemented. This study developed an instrument that measured East-Asian students’ preferred university complaint channels. The research focused on four categories of complaint behaviour: public, private, third party and non-behavioural, and data were collected from 135 East-Asian Business and Management students. A vignette questioning technique was used, providing respondents with hypothetical negative student experiences and recording their likely responses in terms of both how and where they would complain. Results suggest international students are pro-active in reporting dissatisfaction direct to the university, but also share these negative experiences with fellow students. The findings offer new insights to those responsible for managing the student experience and, in particular, for those tasked with handling student complaints

NASCAR as a Public Good

Abstract This paper looks for evidence that either a NASCAR track or NASCAR-sanctioned event influences the monthly rents on residential units. Data cover individual housing units in more than 140 SMSAs over the period spanning from 1993 until 2005. During this period, several new tracks opened, while some other tracks closed, and numerous races changed venues. These changes enable us to identify the capitalization of costs and benefits to a community from the presence of NASCAR tracks and events into rental values. The evidence is mixed, varying with the treatment of housing units located in or out of central cities of SMSAs, as well as the manner in which missing housing and community characteristics are treated in the analysis. The results are reasonably clear that presence of a track by itself has little effect, especially on housing units outside the central city of an SMSA. Specific types of races largely appear to have no impact, though in some specifications, the central city and non-central city impacts are about equal but have opposite signs. In these cases, the indication is that the NASCAR events affect non-central city rents, but not those in the central city. Overall, we must conclude that our results reject NASCAR as a source of either large benefits or costs to residents of the host community.tourism, economic impact, special events, NASCAR, auto racing

Training Big Random Forests with Little Resources

Without access to large compute clusters, building random forests on large datasets is still a challenging problem. This is, in particular, the case if fully-grown trees are desired. We propose a simple yet effective framework that allows to efficiently construct ensembles of huge trees for hundreds of millions or even billions of training instances using a cheap desktop computer with commodity hardware. The basic idea is to consider a multi-level construction scheme, which builds top trees for small random subsets of the available data and which subsequently distributes all training instances to the top trees' leaves for further processing. While being conceptually simple, the overall efficiency crucially depends on the particular implementation of the different phases. The practical merits of our approach are demonstrated using dense datasets with hundreds of millions of training instances.Comment: 9 pages, 9 Figure

Cost Adaptation for Robust Decentralized Swarm Behaviour

Decentralized receding horizon control (D-RHC) provides a mechanism for coordination in multi-agent settings without a centralized command center. However, combining a set of different goals, costs, and constraints to form an efficient optimization objective for D-RHC can be difficult. To allay this problem, we use a meta-learning process -- cost adaptation -- which generates the optimization objective for D-RHC to solve based on a set of human-generated priors (cost and constraint functions) and an auxiliary heuristic. We use this adaptive D-RHC method for control of mesh-networked swarm agents. This formulation allows a wide range of tasks to be encoded and can account for network delays, heterogeneous capabilities, and increasingly large swarms through the adaptation mechanism. We leverage the Unity3D game engine to build a simulator capable of introducing artificial networking failures and delays in the swarm. Using the simulator we validate our method on an example coordinated exploration task. We demonstrate that cost adaptation allows for more efficient and safer task completion under varying environment conditions and increasingly large swarm sizes. We release our simulator and code to the community for future work.Comment: Accepted to IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), 201

Shape oscillations of human neutrophil leukocytes: characterization and relationship to cell motility

When neutrophil leukocytes are stimulated by chemotactic factors or by substratum contact, they change their shape. Shape changes are a prerequisite for cellular migration and typically involve the extrusion of thin, veil-like lamellipods and the development of morphological polarity. Stimulation also leads to changes in the neutrophil content of filamentous actin (F-actin), which is the major cytoskeletal component. Suspensions of human neutrophils stimulated with chemoattractants exhibit sinusoidal light-scattering oscillations with a period of approximately 8 s at 37°C. These oscillations arise from periodic fluctuations in the cell body size caused by lamellipod extension and retraction cycles. The light-scattering oscillations are paralleled by corresponding oscillations in F-actin content. This raises the interesting possibility that cyclic actin polymerization constitutes the driving force for shape oscillations of suspended neutrophils. Similar periodic shape changes are present in neutrophils crawling on a surface, suggesting that shape oscillations are important for neutrophil motion. This review summarizes our present knowledge about shape oscillations in suspended and crawling neutrophils and discusses a possible role for these oscillations in neutrophil motility

Comparison of forest attributes derived from two terrestrial lidar systems.

Abstract Terrestrial lidar (TLS) is an emerging technology for deriving forest attributes, including conventional inventory and canopy characterizations. However, little is known about the influence of scanner specifications on derived forest parameters. We compared two TLS systems at two sites in British Columbia. Common scanning benchmarks and identical algorithms were used to obtain estimates of tree diameter, position, and canopy characteristics. Visualization of range images and point clouds showed clear differences, even though both scanners were relatively high-resolution instruments. These translated into quantifiable differences in impulse penetration, characterization of stems and crowns far from the scan location, and gap fraction. Differences between scanners in estimates of effective plant area index were greater than differences between sites. Both scanners provided a detailed digital model of forest structure, and gross structural characterizations (including crown dimensions and position) were relatively robust; but comparison of canopy density metrics may require consideration of scanner attributes

A Churn for the Better: Localizing Censorship using Network-level Path Churn and Network Tomography

Recent years have seen the Internet become a key vehicle for citizens around the globe to express political opinions and organize protests. This fact has not gone unnoticed, with countries around the world repurposing network management tools (e.g., URL filtering products) and protocols (e.g., BGP, DNS) for censorship. However, repurposing these products can have unintended international impact, which we refer to as "censorship leakage". While there have been anecdotal reports of censorship leakage, there has yet to be a systematic study of censorship leakage at a global scale. In this paper, we combine a global censorship measurement platform (ICLab) with a general-purpose technique -- boolean network tomography -- to identify which AS on a network path is performing censorship. At a high-level, our approach exploits BGP churn to narrow down the set of potential censoring ASes by over 95%. We exactly identify 65 censoring ASes and find that the anomalies introduced by 24 of the 65 censoring ASes have an impact on users located in regions outside the jurisdiction of the censoring AS, resulting in the leaking of regional censorship policies

Developing incentives for data stewardship and sharing: Library engagement beyond liaison relationships

Many of the obstacles slowing the adoption of more democratic dissemination of scholarly products are cultural, not technological. While libraries have extended their technological capacity to new methods of dissemination, we have been less proactive in fostering the cultural change necessary for significant adoption. Two particular groups of constituents and communities of practice have been engaged with the library profession, but the personal contact between faculty and librarians at the institutional level is inconsistent and often hinges upon liaison relationships. This poster will describe opportunities for librarians to engage with institutional units and research communities extending beyond institutional boundaries to advance incentives rewarding new forms of dissemination, including data as a valued community resource. Examples of relating changes in dissemination to various community missions will be provided

Exploring Neural Transducers for End-to-End Speech Recognition

In this work, we perform an empirical comparison among the CTC, RNN-Transducer, and attention-based Seq2Seq models for end-to-end speech recognition. We show that, without any language model, Seq2Seq and RNN-Transducer models both outperform the best reported CTC models with a language model, on the popular Hub5'00 benchmark. On our internal diverse dataset, these trends continue - RNNTransducer models rescored with a language model after beam search outperform our best CTC models. These results simplify the speech recognition pipeline so that decoding can now be expressed purely as neural network operations. We also study how the choice of encoder architecture affects the performance of the three models - when all encoder layers are forward only, and when encoders downsample the input representation aggressively

Mobilizing the genome of Lepidoptera through novel sequence gains and end creation by non-autonomous Lep1 Helitrons

Transposable elements (TEs) can affect the structure of genomes through their acquisition and transposition of novel DNA sequences. The 134-bp repetitive elements, Lep1, are conserved non-autonomous Helitrons in lepidopteran genomes that have characteristic 5\u27-CT and 3\u27-CTAY nucleotide termini, a 3\u27-terminal hairpin structure, a 5\u27- and 3\u27-subterminal inverted repeat (SIR), and integrations that occur between AT or TT nucleotides. Lep1 Helitrons have acquired and propagated sequences downstream of their 3\u27-CTAY termini that are 57-344-bp in length and have termini composed of a 3\u27-CTRR preceded by a 3\u27-hairpin structure and a region complementary to the 5\u27-SIR (3\u27-SIRb). Features of both the Lep1 Helitron and multiple acquired sequences indicate that secondary structures at the 3\u27-terminus may have a role in rolling circle replication or genome integration mechanisms, and are a prerequisite for novel end creation by Helitron-like TEs. The preferential integration of Lep1 Helitrons in proximity to gene-coding regions results in the creation of genetic novelty that is shown to impact gene structure and function through the introduction of novel exon sequence (exon shuffling). These findings are important in understanding the structural requirements of genomic DNA sequences that are acquired and transposed by Helitron-like TEs