Digital Commons Network^™

Teaching Engineering Ethics, Steve Eugene Watkins

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

Instruction in engineering ethics is an important aspect of professional development. For universities, it is an element of program assessment and is considered for accreditation. For engineering students, it addresses relationships in professional life and is a topic for professional licensure. A common instructional objective is for students to have an ability to continue developing their ethical knowledge and judgment. Topical content typically includes an introduction to principles of applied ethics with supporting examples of related engineering situations. This paper discusses the organization of the ethics component in a senior seminar course. Key topics are ethics principles in the context …

Spectrum Allocation In Networks With Finite Sources And Data-Driven Characterization Of Users' Stochastic Dynamics, Ahsan-Abbas Ali

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

During emergency situations, the public safety communication systems (PSCSs) get overloaded with high traffic loads. Note that these PSCSs are finite source networks. The goal of our study is to propose techniques for an efficient allocation of spectrum in finite source networks that can help alleviate the overloading of PSCSs. In a PSCS, there are two system segments, one for the system-access control and the other for communications, each having dedicated frequency channels. The first part of our research, consisting of three projects, is based on modeling and analysis of finite source systems for optimal spectrum allocation, for both access-control …

Evolution And Usage Of The Portal Data Archive: 10-Year Retrospective, Kristin A. Tufte, Robert Bertini, Morgan Harvey

Civil and Environmental Engineering Faculty Publications and Presentations

The Portal transportation data archive (http://portal.its.pdx.edu/) was begun in June 2004 in collaboration with the Oregon Department of Transportation, with a single data source: freeway loop detector data. In 10 years, Portal has grown to contain approximately 3 TB of transportation-related data from a wide variety of systems and sources, including freeway data, arterial signal data, travel times from Bluetooth detection systems, transit data, and bicycle count data. Over its 10-year existence, Portal has expanded both in the type of data that it receives and in the geographic regions from which it gets data. This paper discusses the …

A Critical Realist Approach To Engineering Ethics, Eddie Conlon

Conference papers

This paper is focused on the teaching of engineering ethics (EE). Through a focus on safety and the lens of what sociologists call the agency/ structure relationship it examimes various approaches to this teaching. Drawing on Critical Realism it argues there are deficiencies in both the dominant approach and a number of proposed alternatives as they suffer from various forms of conflationism . By drawing on Critical Realism (CR) a more robust agenda for teaching engineering ethics can be developed. It is argued that CR offers a basis for understanding the range of factors which lead to accidents and disasters. …

A Critical Analysis Of Integrated Coastal And Ocean Management In Bangladesh With Lessons From Global Practices, Syed Mamtajul Islam

World Maritime University Dissertations

The coast of Bangladesh is highly dynamic, unique and diverse, the south-western part of which hosts the world’s largest single mangrove forest; the south-central part receives the world’s second largest river system (Ganges-Brahmaputra-Meghna system), contributing to form the world’s largest delta in Bangladesh; and the south-eastern part provides room for major industrial and economic activities such as ports and shipping, ship recycling (2nd in global ranking), ship building, fisheries and tourism (Beaches in Cox’s Bazar – the world’s longest). The earlier land-side coastal management initiatives, which totally ignore ocean issues, have failed to bring a remarkable outcome mainly due to …

Broadband In Nebraska: Current Landscape And Recommendations, Nebraska Information Technology Commission, Nebraska Broadband Initiative, Nebraska Public Service Commission, University Of Nebraska-Lincoln, Nitc Community Council, Nebraska Department Of Economic Development, Aim

Rural Futures Institute: Publications

N ebraska’s broadband vision is that residents, businesses, government entities, commu-nity partners, and visitors have access to affordable broadband service and have the necessary skills to effectively utilize broadband technologies.

Objectives

To increase economic development opportunities, create good-paying jobs, at-tract and retain population, overcome the barriers of distance, and enhance qual-ity of life in Nebraska by stimulating the continuing deployment of broadband technologies which meet the need for increasing connection speeds.

To increase digital literacy and the widespread adoption of broadband technolo-gies in business, agriculture, health care, education, government and by individu-al Nebraskans.

Goals

The following goals and targets help …

Railway/Highway At-Grade Crossing Surface Management: An Overview, Brett R. Malloy, Jerry G. Rose

Kentucky Transportation Center Research Report

This report draws on data from around the United States to describe the features of a successful railway/highway at-grade crossing management program; it emphasizes the highway/trackbed structures and crossing surfaces. Developing a structurally adequate crossing system is imperative, as this will produce a smooth surface and a stable highway/trackbed that prolongs crossings’ lifespans while keeping maintenance costs low and minimizing the number of disruptions encountered by highway and railway traffic. An overview of the guidance issued by several transportation agencies and organizations to facilitate the design and construction of railway/highway at-grade crossings is included here. Equally important to developing a …

Evaluation Of Current Empirical Methods For Predicting Lateral Spread-Induced Ground Deformations For Large Magnitude Earthquakes Using Maule Chile 2010 Case Histories, Ginger Emily Tryon

Theses and Dissertations

Improving seismic hazard analysis is an important part of building safer structures and protecting lives. Since large magnitude earthquakes are rarer than other earthquakes, it is harder to model seismic hazards such as lateral spread displacements for these events. Engineers are often required to extrapolate current lateral spreading models when designing utilities, bridges, and piers to withstand the ground displacements caused by earthquakes with magnitudes larger than 8.0. This study uses three case histories from the Maule Chile 2010 earthquake (Mw =8.8) to develop recommendations on which models are most accurate for large earthquake events and how to improve the …

Challenges And Opportunities Related To Landing The Dream Chaser® Commercial Reusable Space Vehicle At A Public-Use Airport, Brian Gulliver, Cassie Lee, Frank Taylor, Ken Ibold, Christopher Allison

Space Traffic Management Conference

Sierra Nevada Corporation’s (SNC) Space Systems is developing the Dream Chaser^® reusable space vehicle for NASA’s Commercial Crew Program. The Dream Chaser is a lifting body vehicle that lands on a runway similar to the Space Shuttle. Unlike the Shuttle, the Dream Chaser does not require any unique landing aids or specialized equipment as it uses all non-toxic propellants and industry standard subsystems. This allows for immediate access to crew and cargo at wheels-stop. Requiring only 8,000 ft/2,400 m of runway for landing, the Dream Chaser is compatible with numerous public runways. There are, however, unique and complex challenges …

Acuta Enews November 2014 Issue 11

ACUTA Newsletters

Nominate for Ruth A. Michalecki Leadership Award

One Seminar, Many Benefits

Bring Sessions to Your Desktop or Tablet

What's on Your Desk?

Nominate for the Board by Nov. 7

Nominations Open for Institutional Excellence Awards

Security? Room for Improvement

Randy's Top 10 Info Links

Better Mobile 911 Rules

Welcome New Members

Check It Out

Best Practices In Trail Maintenance, Indiana Ltap, Ohio River Greenway Development Commission

Indiana Local Technical Assistance Program (LTAP) Publications

This manual is intended for practical use by trail maintenance managers. It will also be useful for policy makers who are tasked with anticipating and planning for maintenance budget and personnel needs. The recommendations included in this manual were chosen, in part, to facilitate widespread adoption by other trail operators. They are cost-effective solutions that require minimal technological or financial commitments.

This manual does not provide guidance for trail construction and design, except where a maintenance issue can best be resolved by constructing new trail segments. For best practices in design and construction, consult the thorough list of resources provided …

Narrowband And Wideband Spectrum Sensing For Cognitive Radio Networks In A Log-Normal Shadowing Environment, Nedaa Yousef Mohammad Al Hussien

Theses

The efficiency of cognitive radio networks mainly depends on the spectrum sensing stage, in which spectrum opportunities are exploited. However, one of the challenges facing spectrum sensing is the presence of fading and log-normal shadowing. Moreover, when the spectrum utilization is high and details regarding primary user activity are not available, a need to sense the whole spectrum arises. Hence, developing a wideband spectrum sensing technique is a fundamental concern.

In this thesis a narrowband spectrum sensing in a log-normal shadowing .environment is addressed, a closed-form expression for the probability of detection under shadowing is derived. The accuracy of the …

Quantifying Economic Benefits For Rail Infrastructure Projects, Suzanna Long, Ruwen Qin, John Betak, Akhilesh Ojha, John J. Myers

Engineering Management and Systems Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

This project identifies metrics for measuring the benefit of rail infrastructure projects for key stakeholders. It is important that stakeholders with an interest in community economic development play an active role in the development of the rail network. Economic development activities in both rural and urban settings are essential if a nation is to realize growth and prosperity. Many communities have developed goals and visions to establish an economic development program, but they often fail to achieve their goals due to uncertainties during the project selection and planning process. Communities often select a project from a vast pool of ideas …

Flight Physician - October, 2014, Civil Aviation Medical Association

Browse all Civil Aviation Medical Association Newsletters

A twelve page newsletter of the Civil Aviation Medical Association. The newsletter provided news about civil aviation medicine and information related to the organization.

Wi-Fi Real Time Location Systems, Benjamin A. Doll

Open Access Theses

This thesis objective was to determine the viability of utilizing an untrained Wi-Fi real time location system as a GPS alternative for indoor environments. Background research showed that GPS is rarely able to penetrate buildings to provide reliable location data. The benefit of having location information in a facility and how they might be used for disaster or emergency relief personnel and their resources motivated this research. A building was selected with a well-deployed Wi-Fi infrastructure and its untrained location feature was used to determine the distance between the specified test points and the system identified location. It was found …

A Stochastic Multi-Criteria Assessment Of Security Of Transportation Assets, Michelle Sophie Dojutrek

Open Access Dissertations

Transportation project evaluation and prioritization use traditional performance measures including travel time, safety, user costs, economic efficiency, and environmental quality. The project impacts in terms of enhancing the infrastructure resilience or mitigating the consequences of infrastructure damage in the event of disaster occurrence are rarely considered in project evaluation. This dissertation presents a methodology to address this issue so that in evaluating and prioritizing investments, infrastructure with low security can receive the attention they deserve. Secondly, the methodology can be used for evaluating and prioritizing candidate investments dedicated specifically to security enhancement. In defining security as a function of threat …

Image Analysis Using Visual Saliency With Applications In Hazmat Sign Detection And Recognition, Bin Zhao

Open Access Dissertations

Visual saliency is the perceptual process that makes attractive objects "stand out" from their surroundings in the low-level human visual system. Visual saliency has been modeled as a preprocessing step of the human visual system for selecting the important visual information from a scene. We investigate bottom-up visual saliency using spectral analysis approaches. We present separate and composite model families that generalize existing frequency domain visual saliency models. We propose several frequency domain visual saliency models to generate saliency maps using new spectrum processing methods and an entropy-based saliency map selection approach. A group of saliency map candidates are then …

Acuta Enews September 2014 Issue 9

ACUTA Newsletters

DAS Forum Produces Guidelines

Institutional Excellence

OUTSOURCE ON THE RISE

VoIP, Dial Tone, and Outages

Is Your Password Secure?

ACUTA Listserv Is a Valuable Resource

Board Report

The CIO and CFO Need a Strong Partnership

Randy's Top 10 Info Links

Welcome New Members

Check It Out

Cama Newsletter - August, 2014, Civil Aviation Medical Association

Browse all Civil Aviation Medical Association Newsletters

A twelve page newsletter of the Civil Aviation Medical Association. The newsletter provided news about civil aviation medicine and information related to the organization.

Application Of Uav In Maritime Search And Rescue Activities, Xiaojie Wang

Maritime Safety & Environment Management Dissertations (Dalian)

No abstract provided.

Study On Environmental Risk Assessment Of Oil Spill Accidents In Shanghai Port, Jingzhou Chang

Maritime Safety & Environment Management Dissertations (Dalian)

No abstract provided.

Acuta Enews August 2014 Vol. 43, No. 8

ACUTA Newsletters

In this Issue...

1 The Leadership Attitude

2 Fire on Sewanee's Campus

2 Webinar: WUSTL's Award-Winning EMC Project

3 Getting Cloud Credit

4 Register for Fall Seminar in Boston

5 Info Links

6 Board Report

6 Webinar: Requirements to Make Your Campus Wireless Friendly

7 ACUTA Member Benefit: Video Streaming

7 ACUTA Reaches Out to Local Schools

8 Check It out

Performance Analysis Of Mobile Ad-Hoc Routing Protocols By Varying Mobility, Speed And Network Load, Nilotpal Sarmah

Department of Computer Electronics and Engineering: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

One of the most promising network that has emerged from the technology world is the mobile ad-hoc network or MANET. It is a type of multi-hop network. Wireless by nature, MANETs do not have a specific network infrastructure. It is a collection of wireless mobile devices that communicate with each other without the help of any third party backbone like a base-station or a router. It can be hard to imagine how every node in this type of network communicate with one another without having a router. In MANETs, nodes change locations with time, configure themselves and get the information …

Acuta Enews July 2014 Vol. 43, No. 7

ACUTA Newsletters

In this Issue,,.

I Secrets of Effective PD: The 3 P's

2 Webinar: Cooking in the Cloud i Canada's Anti-spam Law (CASL)

3 Annual Dues Reminders Mailed

4 Register for Fall Seminar in Boston

5 911? 9911?

6 My First Encounter with the Budgeting Process

7 lnfo Links

8 Board Report

9 Check It Out

Cama Newsletter - June, 2014, Civil Aviation Medical Association

Browse all Civil Aviation Medical Association Newsletters

A twelve page newsletter of the Civil Aviation Medical Association. The newsletter provided news about civil aviation medicine and information related to the organization.

Preserving The Quality Of Architectural Tactics In Source Code, Mehdi Mirakhorli

College of Computing and Digital Media Dissertations

In any complex software system, strong interdependencies exist between requirements and software architecture. Requirements drive architectural choices while also being constrained by the existing architecture and by what is economically feasible. This makes it advisable to concurrently specify the requirements, to devise and compare alternative architectural design solutions, and ultimately to make a series of design decisions in order to satisfy each of the quality concerns.

Unfortunately, anecdotal evidence has shown that architectural knowledge tends to be tacit in nature, stored in the heads of people, and lost over time. Therefore, developers often lack comprehensive knowledge of underlying architectural design …

Vex Robotics, Ho Joon Cha, Joshua Del Real, Jamie Kalb, Thomas Nance, Jenny Yang

Mechanical Engineering Senior Theses

The objective of our project was to design and construct a control system for communication between two autonomous robots, of different size and capabilities, in an environment with numerous obstacles and challenges. These challenges, completed autonomously, involved moving over and under barriers along with the obtainment and transportation of spherical objects. Our project was tied to the VEX Robotics competition environment as we tested our robots by competing at the World Championships. Unfortunately, due to time and budget considerations, we had to scale back our sensor subsystem. This led to a simpler control system than originally intended; however, we were …

Commodification Of The Female Egg: Stem Cell Technology And The Future, Rachel Ostander

North Carolina Central University Science & Intellectual Property Law Review

No abstract provided.

Alternate Computer Input Device For Individuals With Quadriplegia, Tobais Elder, Michelle Martinez, David Sylvester

Biomedical Engineering

This project details the design development of an alternative computer input system that allows a person with quadriplegia to move a computer's cursor and activate left and right click button inputs. After researching and analyzing possible solutions, an end design was chosen that most appropriately satisfied all user requirements and engineering specifications. This final design employs a head mounted Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) with 9 DoF (Degrees of Freedom) to track head movements and correlate these motions to computer cursor movements. A Sip-Puff Transducer monitors and interprets a user's application of negative and positive air pressure differentials to a vinyl …

Volunteered Geographical Information: An Alternative Solution For Overcoming The Chasm Between Stormwater Management And Community Participation, Yanfu Zhou

Community and Regional Planning Program: Theses

It is a dramatic challenge to promote public engagement in stormwater management and green infrastructure initiatives. When traditional outreach approaches made important influence on public engagement, their limitations are also obvious. With the development of Web 2.0 technology, Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) has been emerging as one of the most important user-generated geographic contents. The crowdsourcing data that generated by volunteers through geo-web, smartphones, and other geo-devices provides invaluable mass data for decision-making. VGI can provide a better understanding of planning issues and other challenges. The research aims to develop a mobile information platform to allow citizens to report the …