Browsing by Subject "communication"

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Administrative Services Task Force: Electronic Communications with Students
(University of Minnesota, 2006) Fawcett, Renee; Koepke, Beth; Powell, Heather; Utke, Bob; Vuldjeva, Maria
Email is the official communication vehicle between the University and its students. Effective communication enhances the student experience, facilitates learning, and provides timely opportunities for students to participate in civic engagement. Consequently it is vital that students receive, read, and act on information from the University. There is a perception that students disregard University emails because of the high volume of University emails. The goal of this project is to assess the current situation surrounding University electronic communications with students and recommend solutions to the problems we identify.
Arts Organizations and Their Impact on Adverse Childhood Experiences
(2017-05) Clarke, Kristine
The following three questions will be examined through this study. First, what role do arts organizations play in relation to Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs)? Second, do art organizations make any impact on individuals who have experienced ACEs? Third, do these organizations create this impact knowingly or unknowingly? Through examining six organizations it appears that arts organizations serve as efficient supplemental tools in helping individuals suffering from side effects of ACEs. By combining organizational efforts around mental health, rehabilitation, and social work with those of arts organizations, individuals are able to find a pathway or alternative communication method to expressing their emotions, fears, and demons that they have been trying to keep hidden. The research has also shown that art organizations are helping people confronting ACEs without knowing that the programming is indeed helping individuals facing ACEs. Through examining these questions the recommendation from this paper is for mental health, rehabilitation, and social work organizations to acknowledge how useful the arts can be for their patients and clients, and to seek out collaborations with these organizations.
Assessing Millennial Brand Equity for the Minnesota Historical Society
(University of Minnesota Tourism Center, 2015-06-30) Linnemanstons, Katherine; Schneider, Ingrid; Gartner, William
The University of Minnesota Tourism Center worked with the Minnesota Historical Society (MNHS) to investigate its brand equity with millennials (defined as those born between 1980 and 1993). Specifically, the Tourism Center assessed customer-based brand equity with regards to four dimensions: Awareness, Image, Quality and Loyalty. Results from this research will allow promotions and marketing staff to align perceived brand identity with intended brand identity among millennials. Similarly, development professionals can use the information to better understand how to connect with millennials.
Complex signals and perceiver behavior
(2015-12) Rubi, Tricia
Darwin, Huxley, and the Nineteenth-Century Rhetoric of Science
(2016-09) Wright, Jeffrey
The interactions between Charles Darwin and Thomas Henry Huxley are widely misunderstood. Huxley neither rejected Darwin’s core ideas nor accepted them uncritically; instead, each scientist strongly influenced the other over a period of several decades. Fully understanding their debate requires understanding the rhetoric of the time, which leads to a realization that nineteenth-century scientists were familiar with a rhetoric of science that addresses many of the same issues that the discipline does today. The rhetorician Benjamin Humphrey Smart, although almost forgotten today, was highly influential not only on Darwin, but on the physicist Michael Faraday and the philosopher of science John Stuart Mill. His ideas set much of the background for the debate.
Data supporting "Informational Masking Constrains Vocal Communication in Nonhuman Animals"
(2023-01-09) Gupta, Saumya; Kalra, Lata; Rose, Gary J; Bee, Mark A; gupta333@umn.edu; Gupta, Saumya
Noisy social environments constrain human speech communication in two important ways: spectrotemporal overlap between signals and noise can reduce speech audibility (“energetic masking”) and noise can also interfere with processing the informative features of otherwise audible speech (“informational masking”). To date, informational masking has not been investigated in studies of vocal communication in nonhuman animals, even though many animals make evolutionarily consequential decisions that depend on processing vocal information in noisy social environments. In this study of a treefrog, in which females choose mates in noisy breeding choruses, we investigated whether informational masking disrupts the processing of vocal information in the contexts of species recognition and sexual selection. The associated data for this work is being released prior to the publication of the manuscript for peer review.
Data supporting Lung-to-ear sound transmission does not improve directional hearing in green treefrogs (Hyla cinerea)
(2020-09-04) Christensen-Dalsgaard, Jakob; Lee, Norman; Bee, Mark A; mbee@umn.edu; Bee, Mark A
Amphibians are unique among extant vertebrates in having middle ear cavities that are internally coupled to each other and to the lungs. In frogs, the lung-to-ear sound transmission pathway can influence the tympanum’s inherent directionality, but what role such effects might play in directional hearing remain unclear. In this study of the American green treefrog (Hyla cinerea), we tested the hypothesis that the lung-to-ear sound transmission pathway functions to improve directional hearing, particularly in the context of intraspecific sexual communication. Using laser vibrometry, we measured the tympanum’s vibration amplitude in females in response to a frequency modulated sweep presented from 12 sound incidence angles in azimuth. Tympanum directionality was determined across three states of lung inflation (inflated, deflated, reinflated) both for a single tympanum in the form of the vibration amplitude difference (VAD) and for binaural comparisons in the form of the interaural vibration amplitude difference (IVAD). The state of lung inflation had negligible effects (typically less than 0.5 dB) on both VADs and IVADs at frequencies emphasized in the advertisement calls produced by conspecific males (834 Hz and 2730 Hz). Directionality at the peak resonance frequency of the lungs (1558 Hz) was improved by ≅ 3 dB for a single tympanum when the lungs were inflated versus deflated, but IVADs were not impacted by the state of lung inflation. Based on these results, we reject the hypothesis that the lung-to-ear sound transmission pathway functions to improve directional hearing in frogs.
Digital Storytelling: An Integration of Participatory Culture, Education and Narrative
(2013-05-31) Liesinger, Brian
Engaging students who depend more than ever on digital technology and the Internet is an increasing burden for higher education in the 21st century. What rules today is a highly participatory culture relying on being “plugged-in” constantly. This project proposes Digital Storytelling (DST) as a cross-disciplinary activity to harness digital technology for educating media literate citizens able to put technology to use productively and meaningfully. In short, digital stories are brief narratives constructed digitally that combine the power of storytelling with still and moving imagery and a soundtrack to and convey meaning creatively.
The economics of animal communication: theory and experiments integrating receiver choice and strategic signal reliability
(2015-12) Polnaszek, Timothy
This research centers on two themes fundamental to communication, signal reliability and receiver tolerance of imperfect reliability (abbreviated as receiver tolerance). Focus on signal reliability tends to dominate research on signaler-receiver interactions, but represents only half of the signaling dyad. Understanding why signals are reliable and why receivers follow imperfect reliability are equally important; I argue the combination of reliability and receiver tolerance to ultimately determines the form and stability of signaler-receiver interactions. To explore these themes, I first developed a model of signaling interactions that combines aspects of models of receiver choice and signal reliability. The results highlight the co-importance of receiver tolerance and reliability enforcement mechanisms (such as signal cost). To experimentally test the model predictions, I developed a novel laboratory signaling game that allows control over theoretically important variables (such as the level of conflict between the signaler and receiver). The game placed blue jay subjects (Cyanocitta cristata) in a signal-response game played for food rewards. A series of these signaling-game experiments demonstrate the effects of signal cost on signal reliability (or honesty) and show the extent to which uncertainty in the environment generates receiver tolerance. Signal cost is an important topic in signaling theory, but lacks direct empirical support. I show that high signal cost does increase honesty under conditions of conflict, but also that cost is unnecessary in mutualistic conditions. I also show that receiver tolerance increases when environments are uncertain (to the point that receivers are gullible), and that signalers are sensitive to the level of receiver tolerance – exploiting tolerance when signaler and receiver interests conflict. Taken together, these models and experiments establish the value of considering both signal reliability and receiver tolerance.
Educator-Caregiver Communication Through Technology: A Survey of Early Childhood Educators of the Deaf
(2023) Roemen, Brynn
There has been an increasingly steady growth and utilization of communication technology between early childhood educators and caregivers. This practice for communication has revealed benefits for educators, caregivers, and children as well as positive perceptions surrounding the use of technology for communication between school and home. Despite the largely positive findings, there is limited research of this nature in the field of Deaf education with early childhood educators and caregivers of Deaf children. The goal of this study was to develop a survey of educators who serve Deaf children (ages 3-8 years old) to examine the current state of how educators in early childhood were utilizing technology to communicate with students’ caregivers, share American Sign Language resources to support language and literacy development, and identify differences between educational settings. Results revealed educators in early childhood Deaf education utilize a variety of technology for communication and hold generally positive perceptions about technology and how it can increase communication and knowledge between school and home. Perceptions about the benefits and challenges of using technology with caregivers aligned with findings from previous research. However, new benefits and challenges distinctive to early childhood Deaf education in the United States were also found. This research is one of the first studies to contribute and expand on the limited literature in early childhood Deaf education and explore possibilities for future research studies in the field of early childhood Deaf education and educator-caregiver communication through technologies.
The Effect of Parent-Implemented Functional Communication Training on Challenging Behavior and Communication: A Meta-Analysis
(2019-05) Pennington, Brittany
A high proportion of people with developmental disabilities engage in challenging behavior compared to the general population (McClintock, Hall, & Oliver, 2003). Functional Communication Training (FCT) is an is an evidence-based intervention to address challenging behavior (Heath et al., 2015), but many people remain unable to access effective interventions like FCT. One strategy to increase access is to train parents to be interventionists for their children. The present study is a meta-analysis of studies examining parent-implemented FCT. Procedures were registered with PROSPERO prior to data extraction (Registration # CRD42018100912, Pennington, 2018). The study addresses the following questions: (1) What is the overall effect of parent-implemented FCT on challenging behavior and communication? (2) What are the characteristics of participants, implementers, and interventions in parent-implemented FCT studies, and to what extent do those characteristics moderate outcomes? (3) Do parents implement FCT with fidelity, and how were parents trained or coached? and (4) To what extent do included studies meet quality indicators? I used a multi-level, mixed effects meta-analysis to examine the effects of parent-implemented FCT on challenging behavior for 53 participants in 21studies, and on communication for 29 participants in 14 studies. Overall, FCT had a moderate to large effect size for reducing challenging behavior and a large effect size for increasing communication. No significant moderators were found for participant or coaching characteristics. For intervention characteristics, implementing the intervention in natural settings was significantly associated with an increased effect size. These results indicate that parent-implemented FCT is an effective intervention across various participant, intervention, and coaching characteristics.
GeoComputational Approaches to Evaluate the Impacts of Communication on Decision-making in Agriculture
(2018-12) Runck, Bryan
This dissertation proposes a new geocomputational approach to evaluate how communication-based interventions impact outcomes in agriculture. The decisions that people make in agriculture over the next ten to fifteen years will have long-term global consequences because agriculture is going to need to broadly change in order to meet the needs of the future. Many of the technical requirements and economic demands needed to enhance agriculture’s sustainability have been articulated with relative clarity. What remains opaque are the details of who should change, when, where, and how. A growing number of organizations are turning to communication-based interventions to answer these questions with people who will be impacted by changes. Evaluating these interventions is difficult because they are qualitative, affective, meaning-oriented, and discursive. This dissertation builds on existing trends in geocomputation around qualitative geographic information systems and incorporates new methods from machine learning into spatial agent-based modeling. Doing so allows for largely automated creation of agents from natural language text. The dissertation expands on these new tools in each chapter and applies them to the challenge of evaluating communication- based interventions focused on Midwest agriculture. Results suggest that novel insights can be gained into the inner workings of communication-based interventions for improving decision-making using the approaches described in this dissertation.
Guest Fernando Delgado: It's More Than That
(2019-11-13) Pedersen, Paula; Lieberman, Hannah
Having personally navigated overt bias and death threats, Fernando Delgado talks about the need for "more conversations" and "respectful disagreeing." As UMD’s Executive Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs, Fernando sees opportunity in challenging each other along the journey to personal growth. Hope you enjoy this episode, and as always, be sure to hit subscribe for more stories that celebrate the human experience in higher education.
Guest Joanne Coffin-Langdon: It's More Than That
(2020-05-19) Pedersen, Paula; Lieberman, Hannah
Bridging between adverse populations– deaf and hearing, Christian and non, straight and queer– is Joanne Coffin-Langdon’s life’s work. Coffin-Langdon was born in Germany and is a mom of nine children, and her story is about boldly and consistently answering the call. Enjoy, and as always, be sure to hit subscribe for more stories that celebrate the human experience in higher education.
The Information Economics of Social Interactions
(2019-02) Heinen, Virginia
When animals should attend to information is a diverse and fascinating topic, with answers ranging from neurological mechanisms to evolutionary forces. The broad theme of this thesis is examining learning and information use and social interactions from a game theoretical perspective, but I use this framework to address two distinct topics. The first half of my thesis is a fairly traditional investigation hypotheses about animals’ use of social information in uncertain environments, and how social information use fits within the broader interaction of environmental certainty and information reliability. The second half introduces the more novel topic of behavioral conventions, or coordination problems with multiple equilibria, and how topics in behavioral ecology can benefit from a conventions perspective. Through investigating conventions in general, and conventional communication specifically, I develop a novel laboratory system for investigating learned conventional communication.
Sexual Communication: An Exploration of How Couples Communicate and Consent to Sexual Behaviors
(2018-01) Newstrom, Nicholas
Communication is an important aspect of sexual relationships. As relationships change over the course of the lifespan, life events (e.g., birth of a child) and sexual problems (e.g., low sexual desire; erectile dysfunction) affect couple sexuality. Moreover, sexual miscommunication between couples can lead to unhealthy, frustrating and unsatisfying exchanges between partners and in some cases is one potential pathway to sexual assault. Examining how couples communicate and negotiate sexual behaviors may contribute to more effective sex therapy interventions and even sexual assault prevention strategies. The present research examines how couples communicate about sex and aims to understand the cues couples use to signal consent when engaging in sexual intercourse. In order to investigate sexual communication, I first conducted a critical review of the existing empirical literature on how couples communicate and negotiate sexual behaviors. Through this review I found that sex researchers have investigated how anxiety, types of sexual language, and sexual attitudes affect sexual communication. A major finding is that sexual self-disclosure (i.e., sharing one’s sexual likes and dislikes with their partner) is highly important for relationship and sexual satisfaction. However, few statements can be made to describe the specific communication patterns that couples use to discuss sexual topics. Based on the review I suggest that this finding may be attributed to the limitations of sexual script theory (one commonly used theory with which to view sexual communication) and the research’s historical emphasis on individual, rather than couple-oriented interventions for sexual problems. To identify how individuals use and interpret cues to engage in sexual intercourse, I conducted a cross-sectional study. Using Amazon Mechanical Turk, I surveyed individuals on how they indicate and interpret verbal and nonverbal cues to engage in sexual consent. Given that individuals in relationships may be more effective at signaling and reading their partner’s sexual cues, analysis of variance and regression equations were used to investigate how relationship length, sexual self-disclosure, and the interaction of the two affected their verbal and nonverbal communication patterns. The models suggest that gender, and not relationship satisfaction affect how individuals communicate consent. Surprisingly, statements about intoxication were also forms of communication that males and females used to signal consent to their partners. Currently, efforts to prevent sexual miscommunication have centered on affirmative sexual consent policies and dating education programs for children in middle school. The results of this study suggest that psychoeducation programs developed to prevent sexual communication should include information about how alcohol is used to signal consent and take into account gender differences that exist for how individuals signal and interpret communication cues. Implications of these two studies highlight the importance for understanding how couples communicate about sexual behaviors. Identifying specific combinations of verbal and nonverbal cues will address the limitations of sexual script theory and may classify patterns of sexual communication that reduce the chance of sexual assault. Future studies may benefit from diary study designs or the infusion of technology, such as virtual reality, in research designs to answer these questions.
The Speculative in Communication Research: Data, Identity, and the Pursuit of Professionalism, 1940-1960
(2020-05) Hristova, Elena
From the 1940s, the Bureau of Applied Social Research (BASR) at Columbia University was an important location for the development of foundational ideas about, theories of, and methods to study communication and media. This dissertation employs archival materials and is a women’s labor history of these ideas, theories, and methods. Exceptional women working at the BASR had numerous opportunities to develop their careers while facing significant institutional barriers such as nepotism rules, foundational support for research, and gendered expectations of academic and domestic labor. Women formed “special relationships” with male superiors which provided them with cultural capital and support for Rockefeller Foundation fellowship applications. Institutional barriers meant that academic prestige through publication was denied to women, and they were instead tracked into conducting commercial studies. Proportionally, women conducted half of the academic research men did and double the commercial studies. These commercial studies kept the BASR financially afloat and subsidized male academic research. Female interviewers for the Mr. Biggott project staked a claim to professionalism in the interview transcripts they submitted for coding. Their daily duties and experience became valuable in the study’s development. Using gendered behavior in interview situations, they induced answers from respondents and developed interview techniques that exhibited gendered and raced understandings of professionalism, objectivity, and identity. The mechanics of interview coding that transformed qualitative into quantitative data erased their labor and the subjective decisions made within the interviewing process. Female interviewers produced an understanding of white working-class male identity through the interviewing process, with the men lacking any control over their own representation in the transcripts. In the context of the post-war crisis of masculinity, interviewers constructed the white working-class body and mind through their observations. Importantly, these social scientific constructs contradicted the ways in which their research subjects understood themselves in relation to their country and their citizenship rights. The dissertation points to the larger implications of understanding the social scientific method as a set of human behaviors and relations that produces powerful and lasting ideas about subjects of research and researchers themselves.
Study of Nanowires for Microwave and Millimeter Wave Frequency Applications
(2021-12) Zhang, Yali
This dissertation discusses the application of nanowire (NW) technology applied in millimeter wave and sub-millimeter wave frequency bands. Both magnetic nanowires (MNWs) and copper (Cu) NWs are studied. MNW is proposed for use as bio-labels in nanomedicine application and as magnetic substrate in non-reciprocal design for communication application. To do that, the ferromagnetic resonance (FMR) technique is adopted for MNWs characterization. Cu NW is investigated for use as vertical interconnect in integrated circuit (IC) for wireless communication applications. A coplanar waveguide (CPW) with NW Cu vias design was proposed and studied.The theory and simulation model of MNWs and Cu NWs are first discussed to provide preliminary understanding of the FMR of MNWs and concepts of Cu NW-based vias (chapter 2). Then the MNWs are fully characterized in the DC field domain. The FMR characterization system and methods are developed. The factors that influence the FMR characterization are studied. A tri-labeling system is built based on nickel (Ni), cobalt (Co) and iron (Fe) MNWs. The MNWs in a bio-mimicking and biological media are characterized (chapter 3). Next, to use MNWs in non-reciprocal devices, three key parameters are defined, FMR frequencies, permeability, and linewidth. A complete characterization method is developed to acquire these three parameters accurately (chapter 4). Lastly, the Cu NWs vias in a CPW structure are designed, fabricated, and measured in three frequency bands 0.04-40 GHz, 0.01- 67 GHz and 0.01-110 GHz. The NW via loss is extracted and compared to other advanced via technologies. A comparison of NW and conventional via is also presented. (chapter 5). The outcome of different study investigated in this work show the promising potential of NWs as a favorable material for future biomedical and communication applications.
Talking in Code: Code Review as a Form of Communication
(2023) Lisinker, Regina
As coding and computation increasingly permeate statistics and data science courses, it is important for students to not only learn coding syntax, but also how to communicate their work. The process of code review enhances team communication by implementing a consistent feedback loop between coder and reviewer(s). While code review is commonplace in industry, it is not often implemented in data science classrooms. For this study, teams of undergraduate data science majors partnered with local community organizations to work on a data-focused problem. Students were given code review resources to utilize during the latter half of their projects. Data was collected through surveying students and interviewing their faculty advisors after project completion. This thesis presents results from these data to inform how students utilized the materials, their code review processes, and how they communicate via code review.
Transforming the University: Preliminary Recommendations of the Task Force on Undergraduate Reform: Writing
(University of Minnesota, 2005-12-12) Gurak, Laura; Ross, Donald Jr
The Baccalaureate Writing Initiative is strategic to the University’s goal of becoming one of the top three public research institutions; implementing the initiative will set us apart as the leading university for undergraduate writing instruction, curriculum, and research. Taken as a whole, this Writing Initiative will define the overall University writing experience for all undergraduate students.

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