Digital Commons Network^™

Bridging The Gender Gap In Quantum Physics, Gordon Stecklein

Pomona Senior Theses

Why is it important to study the gender gap in physics? Despite entering the workforce in increasing numbers over the last fifty years, women remain severely underrepresented in science and technology-related careers, particularly in positions of authority. Simultaneously, numerous studies verify that women have the ability to perform as well as – or better than – males in physics, and, when presented in certain lights, as many women as men show an interest in physics. Changes must be made in order to strive for equality and, given the changing demographic of the workforce, increase our country’s diminishing scientific prowess.

Acoustical Measurement Of The Human Vocal Tract: Quantifying Speech & Throat-Singing, Bryant R. Foresman

Pomona Senior Theses

The field of biological acoustics has witnessed a steady increase in the research into overtone singing, or “throat-singing,” in which a singer utilizes resonance throughout the vocal tract to sing melodies with the overtones created by a vocal drone. Recent research has explored both how a singer vocalizes in order to obtain rich harmonics from a vocal drone, as well as how further manipulations of the vocal apparatus function to filter and amplify selected harmonics. In the field of phonetics, vowel production is quantified by measuring the frequencies of vocal tract resonances, or formants, which a speaker manipulates to voice …

A Formal Model Of Semantic Web Service Ontology (Wsmo) Execution, Hai H. Wang, Nick Gibbins, Terry R. Payne, Ahmed Saleh, Jun Sun

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Semantic Web services have been one of the most significant research areas within the semantic Web vision, and have been recognized as a promising technology that exhibits huge commercial potential. Current semantic Web service research focuses on defining models and languages for the semantic markup of all relevant aspects of services, which are accessible through a Web service interface. The Web service modelling ontology (WSMO) is one of the most significant semantic Web service framework proposed to date. To support the standardization and tool support of WSMO, a formal semantics of the language is highly desirable. As there are a …

Paradigms And Perceptions: A Chronology And Analysis Of The Events Of The Chan-75 Hydroelectric Project And The Roles And Relationships Of Participants, Bocas Del Toro, Panama, Jessica Barber

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

The pending construction of the Changuinola 75 Hydroelectric Project (Chan-75) has sparked significant controversy as the affected communities, national non-governmental organizations (NGO’s) and international NGO’s have protested against the conduct of the project’s promoters, the AES Corporation and supporters, the Panamanian government. Located in the Bosque Protector Palo Seco, a buffer zone to La Amistad International Park, the Chan-75 hydroelectric dam project will have significant consequences for the biodiversity, flora and fauna of the area. The dam will also displace four indigenous Ngöbe communities, a traditionally marginalized and underrepresented group, as well as flooding the farmland of many others. Hydroelectric …

Waste Management Education In Samoa: A Collection Of Case Studies On Present Issues, Kathy Feeney

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

Despite the presence of environmental education and awareness programs, Samoa still faces many environmental problems today, especially in the area of waste management. With the influx of packaged goods into a society that had always lived off the land, Samoans have had to change their conception disposal of rubbish. In schools, students are learning about waste management, yet litter and improper disposal of waste continues to be an issue. In order to understand this dichotomy exists, surveys were conducted at eight secondary schools on ‘Upolu and Savai’i to determine what kinds of waste exist at different schools and how much …

Artist Ranking Through Analysis Of On-Line Community Comments, Julia Grace, Daniel Gruhl, Kevin Haas, Meenakshi Nagarajan, Christine Robson, Nachiketa Sahoo

Kno.e.sis Publications

We describe an approach to measure the popularity of music tracks, albums and artists by analyzing the comments of music listeners in social networking online communities such as MySpace. This measure of popularity appears to be more accurate than the traditional measure based on album sales figures, as demonstrated by our focus group study. We faced many challenges in our attempt to generate a popularity ranking from the user comments on social networking sites, e.g., broken English sentences, comment spam, etc. We discuss the steps we took to overcome these challenges and describe an end to end system for generating …

The View From Ventress - 2008, University Of Mississippi. College Of Liberal Arts

Liberal Arts Newsletters

Training tomorrow's leaders. New public policy leadership department is 18th in College; Special Section: Then and Now. The English and Music departments 50 years ago and today.

Uncertainty Assessment Of Aircraft Maintenance Times By Using Evidence Theory And Expert Judgment Elicitation, Huseyin Kudak

Engineering Management & Systems Engineering Theses & Dissertations

The goal of this study is to demonstrate the use of the Dempster-Shafer Theory of evidence as a decision aid to predict aircraft maintenance times during wartime operations using expert judgment elicitation. Increased precision in time estimation enables the jet engine aircraft maintenance facility commander to make more accurate decisions for the Air Force's wartime tactical operations allowing the commander to gain a decisive advantage. A questionnaire was designed to elicit judgments from experts in the Aircraft Maintenance Facility (AMF) to investigate maintenance times of the major failure modes (Ignition, Fuel, and Electrical). Results of the expert judgment elicitation were …

A Tool To Support Ontology Creation Based On Incremental Mini-Ontology Merging, Zonghui Lian

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis addresses the problem of tool support for semi-automatic ontology mapping and merging. Solving this problem contributes to ontology creation and evolution by relieving users from tedious and time-consuming work. This thesis shows that a tool can be built that will take a “mini-ontology” and a “growing ontology” as input and make it possible to produce manually, semi-automatically, or automatically an extended growing ontology as output. Characteristics of this tool include: (1) a graphical, interactive user interface with features that will allow users to map and merge ontologies, and (2) a framework supporting pluggable, semi-automatic, and automatic mapping and …

Accelerating Corpus Annotation Through Active Learning, George Busby, Marc Carmen, James Carroll, Robbie Haertel, Deryle W. Lonsdale, Peter Mcclanahan, Eric K. Ringger, Kevin Seppi

Faculty Publications

PDF of Powerpoint Presentation on accelerating corpus annotation through active learning. This presentation was given at the Conference of the American Association for Corpus Linguistics in 2008.

Analysis Of Canonical Chinese Antonym Co-Occurrence, Eric K. Ringger, Guohui Liu, Shiping Liu, Xingfu Wang

Faculty Publications

PDF of Powerpoint Presentation on canonical Chinese antonym co-occurrence. This presentation was given at the Conference of the American Association for Corpus Linguistics in 2008.

Compiling And Annotating A Syriac Corpus, George Busby, James Carroll, Marc Carmen, Carl Griffin, Robbie Haertel, Kristian Heal, Joshua Heaton, Deryle W. Lonsdale, Peter Mcclanahan, Eric K. Ringger, Kevin Seppi, David Taylor

Faculty Publications

PDF of Powerpoint Presentation on compiling and annotating a Syriac corpus. This presentation was given at the Conference of the American Association for Corpus Linguistics in 2008.

Inside Unlv, Shane Bevell, Donna Mcaleer, David Ashley, Grace Russell, Michelle Mouton, Mamie Peers

Inside UNLV

No abstract provided.

Education In The Environment: A Strategy For Continued Interagency Outdoor Programming: Quarterly Progress Report, Period Ending February 29, 2008, Environmental Education Strategy For Nevada

Reports (PLI Education)

Highlights of the university’s focused efforts during the past three months include the following:

• Progress was made on three projects to meet Southern Nevada Agency Partnership (SNAP) strategic messaging needs: an anti-litter exhibit, a volunteer restoration program with educational components, and activity stations to tell the story of Lee Meadows restoration efforts.
• Interpretive planning is underway for Mountain’s Edge Explorer’s Interpretive Trail.
• A Spanish class tailored to meet the communication needs of environmental educators and interpreters was held January 2008.
• Our Places Tell Stories conference, featuring sixty presenters, panelists, moderators, and facilitators, will be held March 4-6, 2008.
• The Nevada …

What Is Cczn-Armalcolite? A Crystal-Chemical Discussion And An Ad-Hoc Incursion In The Crichtonite-Minerals Group, Gavril Sabau, Augusta Alberico

Studia UBB Geologia

The status of CCZN-armalcolite, commonly still believed to be a variety of armalcolite s.s., is questionable in view of partial evidence suggesting that it would represent a distinct phase, as initially claimed by its discoverers. Because of the rarity of the mineral, combined with its habitual small grain-size, no successful structural investigation could be undertaken so far. Therefore we attempted a chemical overview of existing and original data pertaining to CCZN-armalcolite. With the view of systematizing structure-composition relationships, we analyzed the topology of large cations – bearing close-packed oxides, while extending the nomenclature in use in order to accommodate further …

Complex Adaptive Systems Based Data Integration : Theory And Applications, Eliahu Rohn

Dissertations

Data Definition Languages (DDLs) have been created and used to represent data in programming languages and in database dictionaries. This representation includes descriptions in the form of data fields and relations in the form of a hierarchy, with the common exception of relational databases where relations are flat. Network computing created an environment that enables relatively easy and inexpensive exchange of data. What followed was the creation of new DDLs claiming better support for automatic data integration. It is uncertain from the literature if any real progress has been made toward achieving an ideal state or limit condition of automatic …

Enabling Synergy Between Psychology And Natural Language Processing For E-Government: Crime Reporting And Investigative Interview System, Alicia Iriberri '06, Chih Hao Ku '12, Gondy Leroy

CGU Faculty Publications and Research

We are developing an automated crime reporting and investigative interview system. The system incorporates cognitive interview techniques to maximize witness memory recall, and information extraction technology to extract and annotate crime entities from witness narratives and interview responses. Evaluations of the IE components of the system show that it captures 70 to 77% of information from witness narratives with 93 to 100% precision. Our development goal is for the system to approximate progressively the performance effectiveness of a human investigative interviewer and to generate graphical visualizations of crime report information.

The Impact Of Directionality In Predications On Text Mining, Gondy Leroy, Marcelo Fiszman, Thomas C. Rindflesch

CGU Faculty Publications and Research

The number of publications in biomedicine is increasing enormously each year. To help researchers digest the information in these documents, text mining tools are being developed that present co-occurrence relations between concepts. Statistical measures are used to mine interesting subsets of relations. We demonstrate how directionality of these relations affects interestingness. Support and confidence, simple data mining statistics, are used as proxies for interestingness metrics. We first built a test bed of 126,404 directional relations extracted from biomedical abstracts, which we represent as graphs containing a central starting concept and 2 rings of associated relations. We manipulated directionality in four …

Natural Language Processing And E-Government: Crime Information Extraction From Heterogeneous Data Sources, Chih Hao Ku '12, Alicia Iriberri '06, Gondy Leroy

CGU Faculty Publications and Research

Much information that could help solve and prevent crimes is never gathered because the reporting methods available to citizens and law enforcement personnel are not optimal. Detectives do not have sufficient time to interview crime victims and witnesses. Moreover, many victims and witnesses are too scared or embarrassed to report incidents. We are developing an interviewing system that will help collect such information. We report here on one component, the crime information extraction module, which uses natural language processing to extract crime information from police reports, newspaper articles, and victims’ and witnesses’ crime narratives. We tested our approach with two …

Pysafe: An Interdisciplinary Approach To Interface Design, Matthew Adam Richardson

Theses Digitization Project

The purpose of this project is two fold : examine the prevailing wisdom of the interaction design field over the past forty years and look at emerging perspectives, then apply the established principles along with new trends in a practical application. Includes source code.

An Improved String Composition Method For Sequence Comparison, Guoqing Lu, Shunpu Zhang, Xiang Fang

Department of Statistics: Faculty Publications

Background: Historically, two categories of computational algorithms (alignment-based and alignment-free) have been applied to sequence comparison–one of the most fundamental issues in bioinformatics. Multiple sequence alignment, although dominantly used by biologists, possesses both fundamental as well as computational limitations. Consequently, alignment-free methods have been explored as important alternatives in estimating sequence similarity. Of the alignment-free methods, the string composition vector (CV) methods, which use the frequencies of nucleotide or amino acid strings to represent sequence information, show promising results in genome sequence comparison of prokaryotes. The existing CV-based methods, however, suffer certain statistical problems, thereby underestimating the amount of evolutionary …

Unsupervised Discovery Of Compound Entities For Relationship Extraction, Cartic Ramakrishnan, Pablo N. Mendes, Shaojun Wang, Amit P. Sheth

Kno.e.sis Publications

In this paper we investigate unsupervised population of a biomedical ontology via information extraction from biomedical literature. Relationships in text seldom connect simple entities. We therefore focus on identifying compound entities rather than mentions of simple entities. We present a method based on rules over grammatical dependency structures for unsupervised segmentation of sentences into compound entities and relationships. We complement the rule-based approach with a statistical component that prunes structures with low information content, thereby reducing false positives in the prediction of compound entities, their constituents and relationships. The extraction is manually evaluated with respect to the UMLS Semantic Network …

Monetizing User Activity On Social Networks, Meenakshi Nagarajan, Kamal Baid, Amit P. Sheth, Shaojun Wang

Kno.e.sis Publications

No abstract provided.

Historical Tidbits, The Shoah, And The Teaching Of Mathematics, Wolff-Michael Roth

The Mathematics Enthusiast

In this extended essay, I use cultural-historical activity theory to look at the questions Theodore Eisenberg raises about the inclusion of historical facts, both historical tidbits and ethically questionable tendencies and horrific actions (the Shoah), in the teaching of mathematics. I conclude by suggesting that the ultimate answer has to be one that involves a decision, which means that an answer cannot be provided a priori or be determined by any antecedent. Deciding to include this or that in a mathematical curriculum is an ethical act.

Approximate Owl-Reasoning With Screech, Tuvshintur Tserendorj, Sebastian Rudolph, Markus Krotzsch, Pascal Hitzler

Computer Science and Engineering Faculty Publications

Applications of expressive ontology reasoning for the Semantic Web require scalable algorithms for deducing implicit knowledge from explicitly given knowledge bases. Besides the development of more effi- cient such algorithms, awareness is rising that approximate reasoning solutions will be helpful and needed for certain application domains. In this paper, we present a comprehensive overview of the Screech approach to approximate reasoning with OWL ontologies, which is based on the KAON2 algorithms, facilitating a compilation of OWL DL TBoxes into Datalog, which is tractable in terms of data complexity. We present three different instantiations of the Screech approach, and report on …

Help-Based Tutorials, David G. Novick, Oscar D. Andrade, Nathaniel Bean, Edith Elizalde

Departmental Papers (CS)

The consensus of the documentation literature is that users rarely use help, usually preferring to muddle through. To increase use of help, tutorials for novice users could be changed from guided presentations toward using the system’s actual help system. To determine whether this approach would increase users’ use of help when they encountered problems with an application, we developed an alternative, help-based tutorial introduction to Microsoft Publisher. We compared the behaviors of users introduced to Publisher with the help-based tutorial with the behaviors of users who learned from a traditional tutorial. A balanced study of 22 novice users of Publisher …

Bailey's Hexameters, Jeremiah Farrell, Al Shapiro

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

Nat. Bailey was the most important English lexicographer before Samuel Johnson. Our interest in this essay is to report on some of the 1730 dictionary's entries for the "Entertainmen of the Curious".

Cube Mentalism, Jeremiah Farrell, Ivan Moscovich

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

Our tour of multidimensional cubes begins with the marking of the eight comers of a 3-cube with the eight words HOT, POT, POD, HOD, HAD, HAT, PAT, and PAD. The figure below shows how these eight inherit the labels of the HOT-PAD).die where the letter H is opposite P, the letter O is opposite T and the letter T is opposite the letter D...

The First Gathering, Jeremiah Farrell

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

The following is a photocopy of a letter I sent to my good friend James P. Fink shortly after the first Gathering in 1993. It is not reqritten or edited in any way in hopes of conveying to you some sense of my awe at how very special this event really way. My son David, then a student in Boston, was also privileged to be invited by Tom Rodgers and David and I still feel overwhelmed by the experience.

There are so many memories- and so many friends. After you have read the letter, I will remark on some of …

The Stenographic Affine Plane, Oscar Thumpbindle, Jeremiah Farrell

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

This square, composed of familiar words, is semimagic because any row or column (the rook sweeps) anagrams into STENOGRAPHIC. "Semi" means the diagonals don't. However, there are four very special diagonals; those that have words with one of the four vowels of STENOGRAPHIC in common. These four bishop sweeps will be important later. Keeping with the chess piece theme, the reader will take notice of the knight 4-tours using the consonants P, H, Rand C. For example one of these is the P-tour SAP, PEG, PIN and TOP. Another set of knight tours traces the letters S, T, G and …