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- Creators: Barrett, The Honors College
Description
The purpose of this essay is to explain how celebrities manage their brand, as an image and commodity, using social media. Merriam-Webster defines "celebrity" as the "state of being celebrated." This essay will continue to explain how this state of celebration is a manufactured idea by the individual and the media's portrayal. Celebrities are "well-known for their well-knowness" (Boorstin, 1961, p. 58). Boorstin (1961) explains celebrities achieve fame not for their achievements, but by creating a unique personality (as cited in Turner, 2004). Crowd culture, networks, and audience knowledge are tools celebrities must use to navigate digital nuances. They must manage performance of self, adhere to internet social norms, and the obsessive fame culture. Celebrities are often referred to have "star power" and have a certain "charisma." This cultural identity is "negotiated and formed" contrived by a team through promotion, publicity, and advertising (Turner, 2004). Celebrities market themselves through branded content, media used to promote a product, on their social media pages while targeting crowd cultures. Networks truly define how celebrities must brand themselves on social media. This person-to-person contact establishes fan and consumer connections that build the celebrity's base and following. Despite campaigning in a digital world, it goes back to people connecting with people, not accounts linking to accounts. Celebrities manufacture all of these strategies and tactics as they market themselves as a commodity to target crowd culture audiences. This is why targeting crowd cultures is vitally important for celebrities. This essay explores the techniques of select celebrities as they succeed and fail navigating digital nuances.
ContributorsPierce, Ellen (Author) / Jacoby, Jim (Thesis director) / Himberg, Julia (Committee member) / Department of English (Contributor) / Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2017-12
Description
The purpose of this study is to discover the exposure and network patterns during the 2013-2015 Ebola Virus Disease epidemic. The author accomplished this by taking an opportunistic sample of news and academic articles, some of which may also capture cases untreated and therefore unrecorded by hospitals and treatment units. Most of the 315 cases came from the Washington Post, New York Times, and World Health Organization, and they consistently captured between 1-2% of WHO case numbers. The results show that of cases with known exposures, 53.6% became infected through contact with sick family members. Hospital and funeral transmission accounted for the second and third most frequent exposure scenarios at 24.6% and 12.9% respectively. The exposures over time imply that hospital and funeral transmission prevention efforts have been successful, but family transmission has remained common throughout the outbreak. Prevention initiatives should focus on families earlier in epidemics to help control EVD's spread.
ContributorsCleaton, Julie Marie (Author) / Chowell, Gerardo (Thesis director) / Hurtado, Ana Magdalena (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / School of Human Evolution and Social Change (Contributor) / School of Life Sciences (Contributor)
Created2015-05
Description
Analytic research on basketball games is growing quickly, specifically in the National Basketball Association. This paper explored the development of this analytic research and discovered that there has been a focus on individual player metrics and a dearth of quantitative team characterizations and evaluations. Consequently, this paper continued the exploratory research of Fewell and Armbruster's "Basketball teams as strategic networks" (2012), which modeled basketball teams as networks and used metrics to characterize team strategy in the NBA's 2010 playoffs. Individual players and outcomes were nodes and passes and actions were the links. This paper used data that was recorded from playoff games of the two 2012 NBA finalists: the Miami Heat and the Oklahoma City Thunder. The same metrics that Fewell and Armbruster used were explained, then calculated using this data. The offensive networks of these two teams during the playoffs were analyzed and interpreted by using other data and qualitative characterization of the teams' strategies; the paper found that the calculated metrics largely matched with our qualitative characterizations of the teams. The validity of the metrics in this paper and Fewell and Armbruster's paper was then discussed, and modeling basketball teams as multiple-order Markov chains rather than as networks was explored.
ContributorsMohanraj, Hariharan (Co-author) / Choi, David (Co-author) / Armbruster, Dieter (Thesis director) / Fewell, Jennifer (Committee member) / Brooks, Daniel (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / School of Mathematical and Statistical Sciences (Contributor)
Created2013-05
Description
As technologies advance, so does the curiosity and exploration of humankind. There are many domains across this planet that are unexplored \u2014 the depths of Earth's ocean being one of the most predominant. While the ocean covers seventy percent of Earth's surface, a vast ninety-five percent of this realm remains untouched and unseen by the human eye. The biggest causality of this can be identified in the limitations of current technologies and the large expense associated with delving into these dangerous and uncharted areas. Underwater communication between unmanned devices is the solution to this problem. With the oceanic deployment of wirelessly connected unmanned underwater vehicles (UUVs), researchers can limit risk to human safely and retrieve invaluable oceanographic data from unimaginable depths. However, before this system can be physically deployed, the network topology and environmental interactions must be simulated. More specific to the application, how does attenuation of optical propagation degrade between transmissions? A widely used open source network simulator is the ns series: ns-1, ns-2, and ns-3. Ns-3 is the most recent version, and is a valuable tool for modeling network interactions. However, underwater simulation proposes a limitation \u2014 a three-dimensional consideration for pressure. To properly model this interaction, it is vital that an extension to ns-3 be provided in order to account for the affects pressure has on the propagation of a signal at varying depths.
ContributorsSowa, Ryan John (Author) / Richa, Andrea (Thesis director) / Saripalli, Srikanth (Committee member) / Zhou, Chenyang (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / Computer Science and Engineering Program (Contributor)
Created2013-05
Description
IoT Media broadcast devices, such as the Roku stick, Amazon Fire, and Chromecast have been emerging onto the market recently as a portable and inexpensive alternative to cable and disk players, allowing easy integration between home and business Wi-Fi networks and television systems capable of supporting HDMI inputs without the additional overhead of setting up a heavy or complicated player or computer. The rapid expansion of these products as a mechanism to provide for TV Everywhere services for entertainment as well as cheap office appliances brings yet another node in the rapidly expanding network of IoT that surrounds us today. However, the security implications of these devices are nearly unexplored, despite their prevalence. In this thesis, I will go over the structure and mechanisms of Chromecast, and explore some of the potential exploits and consequences of the device. The thesis contains an overview of the inner workings of Chromecast, goes over the segregation and limited control and fundamental design choices of the Android based OS. It then identifies the objectives of security, four different potential methods of exploit to compromise those objectives on a Chromecast and/or its attached network, including rogue applications, traffic sniffing, evil access points and the most effective one: deauthentication attack. Tests or relevant analysis were carried out for each of these methods, and conclusions were drawn on their effectiveness. There is then a conclusion revolving around the consequences, mitigation and the future implications of security issues on Chromecast and the larger IoT landscape.
ContributorsHuang, Kaiyi (Author) / Zhao, Ziming (Thesis director) / Ahn, Gail-Joon (Committee member) / W. P. Carey School of Business (Contributor) / Computer Science and Engineering Program (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2016-12
Description
The software element of home and small business networking solutions has failed to keep pace with annual development of newer and faster hardware. The software running on these devices is an afterthought, oftentimes equipped with minimal features, an obtuse user interface, or both. At the same time, this past year has seen the rise of smart home assistants that represent the next step in human-computer interaction with their advanced use of natural language processing. This project seeks to quell the issues with the former by exploring a possible fusion of a powerful, feature-rich software-defined networking stack and the incredible natural language processing tools of smart home assistants. To accomplish these ends, a piece of software was developed to leverage the powerful natural language processing capabilities of one such smart home assistant, the Amazon Echo. On one end, this software interacts with Amazon Web Services to retrieve information about a user's speech patterns and key information contained in their speech. On the other end, the software joins that information with its previous session state to intelligently translate speech into a series of commands for the separate components of a networking stack. The software developed for this project empowers a user to quickly make changes to several facets of their networking gear or acquire information about it with just their language \u2014 no terminals, java applets, or web configuration interfaces needed, thus circumventing clunky UI's or jumping from shell to shell. It is the author's hope that showing how networking equipment can be configured in this innovative way will draw more attention to the current failings of networking equipment and inspire a new series of intuitive user interfaces.
ContributorsHermens, Ryan Joseph (Author) / Meuth, Ryan (Thesis director) / Burger, Kevin (Committee member) / Computer Science and Engineering Program (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2016-12
Description
Speakshield.com will be a social networking site in the style of Twitter.com, but created for businesses that need a more secure way to communicate with their employees without compromising their organization's trade secrets and their employees' personal data. This website will be used by businesses to allow coworkers to collaborate on projects, communicate their ideas publicly to the company, and network with each other, without having that private information leak out to unintended recipients or be vulnerable in case of hacking incidents.
ContributorsKlepfish, Mikhail (Author) / Anderson, Dennis (Thesis director) / Happel, Stephen (Committee member) / Hensley, Matt (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / W. P. Carey School of Business (Contributor) / Department of Information Systems (Contributor)
Created2013-05
Description
The insurance industry consists of financial advisors planning for individual’s financial future through defensive investments that will payout in case of something happening to a person’s greatest asset—themselves. Each financial advisor is mandated to pass a professional exam to receive their license in order to take in clients in each state. There is a process in which clients are serviced and sold on different products of insurance. Advisors need to consider client needs and service them with products are in their best interest and within financial reason. <br/> To sell a product you must have clients, and the way that financial advisor receive clients are generally through two ways: company provided or their own connections. At the end of the day, the goal is to get in front of more people and expand you circle. In that sense, there are two common way people address this expansion of circles and that is build relationships versus networking. The goal of this paper is to dive deep in the insurance industry and analyze the sales process when comparing the difference in selling through building relationships versus selling through networking.<br/> The research plan I have in mind start from researching background and history, to current practices environment, to method process solutions. In the initial stages of my research, I will focus on background and history of the financial services industry in terms of sales and insurance. This will address insurance sales processes in the financial services industry and its features as well as benefits. After explaining the step by step process and potential results of the sales process in the insurance industry, I will start researching current environments of the industry. This will explain the history, key theoretical elements, and significant events of the industry. <br/> The history of the background will set stage for me to address situational challenges in the business based on my own experience to which I will do research to find plausible sales process solutions when comparing relationship sales to networking sales. This research will then be synthesized with my own experimental solutions as I work in the industry, which will help me complete chapter 4 and 5 of my theses – Methods and Execution of Results.
ContributorsSkelnik, Eason John (Author) / Byrne, Jared (Thesis director) / Desiderio, Jake (Committee member) / Department of Finance (Contributor) / Department of Supply Chain Management (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2021-05
Description
Astrobiology, as it is known by official statements and agencies, is “the study of the origin, evolution, distribution, and future of life in the universe” (NASA Astrobiology Insitute , 2018). This definition should suit a dictionary, but it may not accurately describe the research and motivations of practicing astrobiologists. Furthermore, it does little to characterize the context in which astrobiologists work. The aim of this project is to explore various social network structures within a large body of astrobiological research, intending to both further define the current motivations of astrobiological research and to lend context to these motivations. In this effort, two Web of Science queries were assembled to search for two contrasting corpora related to astrobiological research. The first search, for astrobiology and its close synonym, exobiology, returned a corpus of 3,229 journal articles. The second search, which includes the first and supplements it with further search terms (see Table 1) returned a corpus of 19,017 journal articles. The metadata for these articles were then used to construct various networks. The resulting networks describe an astrobiology that is well entrenched in other related fields, showcasing the interdisciplinarity of astrobiology in its emergence. The networks also showcase the entrenchment of astrobiology in the sociological context in which it is conducted—namely, its relative dependence on the United States government, which should prompt further discussion amongst astrobiology researchers.
ContributorsBromley, Megan Rachel (Author) / Manfred, Laubichler (Thesis director) / Sara, Walker (Committee member) / School of Mathematical and Statistical Sciences (Contributor) / School of Earth and Space Exploration (Contributor) / Department of English (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2019-12
Description
Ad hoc wireless networks present several interesting problems, one of which is Medium Access Control (MAC). Medium Access Control is a fundamental problem deciding who get to transmit next. MAC protocols for ad hoc wireless networks must also be distributed, because the network is multi-hop. The 802.11 Wi-Fi protocol is often used in ad hoc networking. An alternative protocol, REACT, uses the metaphor of an auction to compute airtime allocations for each node, then realizes those allocations by tuning the contention window parameter using a tuning protocol called SALT. 802.11 is inherently unfair due to how it returns the contention window to its minimum size after successfully transmitting, while REACT’s distributed auction nature allows nodes to negotiate an allocation where all nodes get a fair portion of the airtime. A common application in the network is audio streaming. Audio streams are dependent on having good Quality of Service (QoS) metrics, such as delay or jitter, due to their real-time nature.
Experiments were conducted to determine the performance of REACT/SALT compared to 802.11 in a streaming audio application on a physical wireless testbed, w-iLab.t. Four experiments were designed, using four different wireless node topologies, and QoS metrics were collected using Qosium. REACT performs better in these these topologies, when the mean value is calculated across each run. For the butterfly and star topology, the variance was higher for REACT even though the mean was lower. In the hidden terminal and exposed node topology, the performance of REACT was much better than 802.11 and converged more tightly, but had drops in quality occasionally.
Experiments were conducted to determine the performance of REACT/SALT compared to 802.11 in a streaming audio application on a physical wireless testbed, w-iLab.t. Four experiments were designed, using four different wireless node topologies, and QoS metrics were collected using Qosium. REACT performs better in these these topologies, when the mean value is calculated across each run. For the butterfly and star topology, the variance was higher for REACT even though the mean was lower. In the hidden terminal and exposed node topology, the performance of REACT was much better than 802.11 and converged more tightly, but had drops in quality occasionally.
ContributorsKulenkamp, Daniel (Author) / Syrotiuk, Violet R. (Thesis director) / Colbourn, Charles J. (Committee member) / Computer Science and Engineering Program (Contributor, Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2019-12