Tag: Poster 140

The Effect of Climate Change on Coastal versus Inland Snow: The Expected, the Counter- Intuitive and their Connection

Presenter(s): Adriann Bechtle − Architecture

Faculty Mentor(s): Dave Sutherland

Poster 140

Research Area: Earth Science

Although the impact climate change has on the cryosphere as a whole is generally understood, the way it plays out in different regions varies and may sometimes seem counter-intuitive. The west coast and midwestern United States are two regions that exemplify the dichotomy between familiar and surprising effects of climate change because their weather is affected by different things and their cryospheres take on nuanced forms. On the west coast the snow is largely limited to high altitudes and it accumulates there to create glaciers. In the midwest, on the other hand, the vast majority of snow
is annual and is highly dependent upon weather patterns. The observable trends in both regions is a decline in snowpack, whether that is annual or accumulative snowpack. Both trends appear to be a direct products of global warming. What differentiates these regions is the change in precipitation and the ways these changes affect the environment and human populations. The west coast is largely suffering from a decline in precipitation and is losing snowpack as a result. This creates a drought because the snowpack is a significant water source. Meanwhile the midwest is actually having an increase in severe winter precipitation, this has its own catastrophic consequences. The question is how these phenomena are connected and if they share an underlying cause. By comparing and contrasting trends in winter precipitation and snowpack from both regions we can see what aspects of climate change are universal versus regional and potentially answer our question.

Twitter Data for Brand Insight

Presenter(s): Gillian George

Co Presenter(s): Vanessa Zamudio

Faculty Mentor(s): Dave Markowitz

Poster 140

Session: Social Sciences & Humanities

Does a brand’s engagement in Corporate Social Responsibility lead to higher financial returns and positive consumer engagement? This study evaluated four Fortune 500 companies (Campbell’s, Pepsi, Nike, and Kellogg’s) that made public ethics statements on current social issues (e.g., same-sex couples, interracial families, among others). We analyzed these companies within a two-week period, one week before and one week after their ethics statements were made, to understand if their social media activity (e.g., the number of favorites per Tweet) and stock price changed after the campaign period. We gathered Twitter data computationally through the R computing interface to collect number of favorites for each company before and after making their ethical statements public. We also evaluated the language data of each Tweet and performed an automated text analysis with Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) software to evaluate changes in language patterns related to authenticity (e.g., first-person singular pronouns) from before and after the ethical statements. The language data suggest that there was a marginally significant increase in authenticity from before to after the ethics stance (p = .075). However, stock price was not significantly different after evaluating company performance before or after the ethics campaign and stance (p = .987). We propose that changes in authenticity relate to a credibility mechanism as prior work suggests that people attempt to boost their credibility by using more “I” statements. We did notice a 10% increase in levels of authentic language as well as no change in stock price. Overall, there was no significant findings to prove a correlation between stock price, twitter engagement, and level of authenticity in language when comparing Tweets before and after an ethical campaign.