Digital Commons Network^™

Odds And Ends, Dana Anderson

Inscape

No abstract provided.

Editor's Introduction: Through A Glass, Darkly, Daniel C. Peterson, John Gee

Review of Books on the Book of Mormon 1989–2011

No abstract provided.

Susan Easton Black, Ed. Expressions Of Faith: Testimonies Of Latter-Day Saint Scholars., J. Howard Rytting

Review of Books on the Book of Mormon 1989–2011

No abstract provided.

Vol. 9 Num. 2 Farms Review Of Books, Farms Review

Review of Books on the Book of Mormon 1989–2011

No abstract provided.

Review Essay: De Weever, Jacqueline. Chaucer Name Dictionary: A Guide To Astrological, Biblical, Historical, Literary, And Mythological Names In The Works Of Geoffrey Chaucer, Sigmund Eisner

Quidditas

de Weever, Jacqueline. Chaucer Name Dictionary: A Guide to Astrological, Biblical, Historical, Literary, and Mythological Names in the Works of Geoffrey Chaucer. Garland Reference Library of the Humanities, 709. Garland Publishing. New York, 1996. xxi + 451 pp. $24.95.

Full Issue

Quidditas

No abstract provided.

Review Essay: Dinzelbacher, Peter, And James Lester Hogg, Eds. Kulturgeschichte Der Christlichen Orden In Einzeldarstellungen, Albrecht Classen

Quidditas

Dinzelbacher, Peter, and James Lester Hogg, eds. Kulturgeschichte der christlichen Orden in Einzeldarstellungen, ed. Kröners Taschenausgabe, 450. Kröner, Stuttgart, 1997. xii + 419 pp., 6 illustrations. DM 42.

Cultural Values And Education In Western Samoa: Tensions Between Colonial Roots And Influences And Contemporary Indigenous Needs, Steven J. Hite, E. Vance Randall, Gaugau Va'afuti Tavana

Faculty Publications

The expansion of western culture throughout the world unavoidably alters and re-shapes the perspective of the peoples engulfed by the "West." The western "universalist" culture engenders a premium on values such as "democracy, individualism, and a high standard of living based on material productivity" (Von Laue, 1987, p. 267; Philips, 1992, p. 80). The encroachment of the western colonial era in the pacific areas of Samoa, Tonga, and the Cook Islands began around 1722 and continues in many forms to the present.

Damped Diocotron Quasi-Modes Of Non-Neutral Plasmas And Inviscid Fluids, S. Neil Rasband, Ross L. Spencer

Faculty Publications

Computations of damped diocotron oscillations (quasi-modes) are described for non-neutral plasmas and inviscid fluids. The numerical method implements a suggestion made by Briggs, Daugherty, and Levy some 25 years ago [Phys. Fluids 13, 421 (1970)] to push the branch line that forms the continuum into the complex w-plane by solving the mode equation in the complex r-plane. For the special case of power-law density profiles the calculation finds the same quasi-mode frequencies found recently by Corngold [Phys. Plasmas 2, 620 (1995)]. It is found that the feature of the continuum eigenfunctions which indicates the presence of a nearby quasi-mode is …

Whose World? What History?, Corrine Lathrop Gilb

Comparative Civilizations Review

No abstract provided.

As You Bend The Twig, So Grows The Tree, Borge M. Christensen

The Bridge

"Left to go to America," teacher Johannes Frederik

Christensen wrote opposite Sophie Pauline Christine

Pedersen in the June, 1884 Kindertofte village school's attendance

and examination class register. For Sophie, daughter of

laborer P. Christian Pedersen, as for the other 1,261 emigrants

under sixteen that left Denmark in 1884 with their families,1

her first meeting with education would greatly contribute to

any success in the new country. The Danish school system

and the village teacher would cast long shadows.

Full Issue

The Bridge

No abstract provided.

Full Issue

The Bridge

No abstract provided.

Hrotswitha Of Gandersheim's Dulcitius And Callimachus In A New Translation, Mark L. Damen

Quidditas

Even without external corroborating evidence, we may infer from her works that the nun Hrotswitha (Hrotsvit in Saxon) lived in Saxony during the second half of the tenth century. Because she seems to have had considerable freedom of movement and expression for a woman at that time, writing about worldly affairs evidently with some personal knowledge of them, she was most likely a canoness, that is, not fully cloistered. She must have visited the courts of the Saxon kings, probably more than once, since she chronicles their exploits and composes poetry of a type briefly popularized by a scholar in …

Faster Ray Tracing Using Adaptive Grids, Thomas W. Sederberg, Krysztof S. Klimaszewski

Faculty Publications

A new hybrid approach is presented which outperforms the regular grid technique in scenes with highly irregular object distributions by a factor of hundreds, and combined with an area interpolator, by a factor of thousands. Much has been said about scene independence of different acceleration techniques and the alleged superiority of one approach over another. Several theoretical and practical studies conducted in the past have led to the same conclusion: a space partitioning method that allows the fastest rendering of one scene often fails with another. Specialization may be the answer. This has always been pursued, consciously or not, in …

On The Dynamic Behaviour Of A Thermoviscoelastic Body In Frictional Contact With A Rigid Obstacle, Kenneth Kuttler, K. T. Andrews, M. Shillor

Faculty Publications

We consider the dynamic behaviour of a thermoviscoelastic body which may come into frictional contact with a rigid obstacle. The frictional contact is modelled by general contact and friction laws which include as special cases the power law normal compliance condition and the corresponding generalization of Coulomb's law of dry friction. The stress-strain constitutive relation is assumed to be of Kelvin-Voigt type and the frictional heat generation on the contact surface is taken into account. In this setting we establish the existence of a solution to a weak version of the energy-elasticity system which consists of a parabolic equation coupled …

The Influence Of Decision Aids On User Behavior: Implications For Knowledge Acquisition And Inappropriate Reliance, Steven M. Glover, Douglas F. Prawitt, Brian C. Spilker

Faculty Publications

Structured decision aids are widely used in many organizational settings, and their influence on judgment consistency and accuracy have received considerable attention in the literature. While two benefits commonly associated with decision aid use are improved judgment and enhanced expertise development, relatively little attention has been directed toward the potential influence of decision aids on decision maker behavior. In particular, we argue that the use of structured aids may influence relatively inexperienced decision makers to approach aided tasks mechanistically, without becoming actively involved in the task or judgment. Such passive decision behavior may, in some situations, threaten gains in performance …

The Ability Of Children With Specific Language Impairment To Participate In A Group Decision Task, Lee Robinson, Martin Fujiki, Bonnie Brinton, Valyne J. Watson

Faculty Publications

This study examined the ability of 6 children with specific language impairment (SLI), ages 8:10 to 12:5 (years; months), to participate in a group negotiation task. Each child interacted with two peers to select toys that children their age would enjoy. Performance was compared to both chronological age-similar (CS) peers and language similar (LS) peers performing the same task. Analyses of the resulting interactions indicated that subjects with SLI produced significantly fewer utterances than the other children in the triad. Similar differences were not observed in the CS or LS triads. Additionally, significantly fewer utterances were addressed to the children …

Improved Heterogeneous Distance Functions, Tony R. Martinez, D. Randall Wilson

Faculty Publications

Instance-based learning techniques typically handle continuous and linear input values well, but often do not handle nominal input attributes appropriately. The Value Difference Metric (VDM) was designed to find reasonable distance values between nominal attribute values, but it largely ignores continuous attributes, requiring discretization to map continuous values into nominal values. This paper proposes three new heterogeneous distance functions, called the Heterogeneous Value Difference Metric (HVDM), the Interpolated Value Difference Metric (IVDM), and the Windowed Value Difference Metric (WVDM). These new distance functions are designed to handle applications with nominal attributes, continuous attributes, or both. In experiments on 48 applications …

A Fertility Channel Model For Post-Correction Of Continuous Speech Recognition, Eric K. Ringger, James F. Allen

Faculty Publications

We have implemented a post-processor called SPEECHPP to correct word-level errors committed by an arbitrary speech recognizer. Applying a noisy-channel model, SPEECHPP uses a Viterbi beam-search that employs language and channel models. Previous work demonstrated that a simple word-for-word channel model was sufficient to yield substantial incieases in word accuracy. This paper demonstrates that some improvements in word accuracy result from augmenting the channel model with an account of word fertility in the channel. This work further demonstrates that a modern continuous speech recognizer can be used in "black-box" fashion for robustly recognizing speech for which the recognizer was not …

“Tomorrow Shall Be My Dancing Day”, Cynthia L. Hallen

BYU Studies

"It's the heart afraid of breaking

That never learns to dance."

–from "The Rose" by Amanda McBroom

Procedurally Rational Decision-Making And Control, Richard L. Frost, Michael A. Goodrich, Wynn C. Stirling

Faculty Publications

Substantive rationality requires a decision-maker to be a utility maximizer; under this paradigm, the decision is paramount, and not dependent on the computational process used to obtain it. Procedural rationality is dependent on the method used to make the decision; reasonableness of the procedure is paramount. Well-formed problems are amenable to substantive rationality; ill-formed problems are not, but are amenable to procedural rationality. To qualify as being procedurally rational, a methodology must possess a sound epistemological basis, it must be amenable to a formal design synthesis procedure, and it must be consistent with substantive rationality. Epistemic utility theory forms the …

Structural Phase Transition And Tc Distribution In Hf-Doped Lamno3 Investigated Using Perturbed-Angular-Correlation Spectroscopy, William E. Evenson, David D. Allred, Gary L. Catchen

Faculty Publications

Using perturbed-angular-correlation (PAC) spectroscopy, via the Hf-->Ta probe, we have measured Mn-site electric-field gradients (EFG's) at Ta nuclei in ceramic samples of LaMnO3. Two crystallographic phases coexist over a temperature interval of ≈16 K near the orthorhombic-to-rhombohedral transition at ≈724 K, which shows a thermal hysteresis of ≈1.7±0.2 K. Concurrently, in the two phases, we determined the temperature dependence of the EFG parameters, Vzz, ƞ, and δ, and the ratio of the probe concentrations A1/A2. To explain the apparent coexistence of two phases in this weakly first-order transition, we present a model that assumes a spatial distribution of Tc …

The Development And Evaluation Of The Knife Finite Element, Brett W. Clark

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis presents the development and evaluation of the knife finite element which is a degenerate case of a hexahedral element. The knife connectivity is an artifact of automatic all-hexahedral mesh generators. Currently, knives are propagated to the surface of the mesh for removal. However since this disturbs the surface mesh, other alternatives are needed. This thesis investigates the option of leaving the knife connectivity in the mesh and treating it as a valid finite element. The shape functions and stiffness matrix for the knife element are derived and evaluated using theoretical and practical evaluations. It is concluded that the …

And They Cast Lots: Divination, Democracy, And Josephus, Eric D. Huntsman

BYU Studies

After the men had chosen by lot ten of their number who would be their butchers, and when they had laid down beside and thrown their arms around their wives and children who lay waiting, they offered themselves up for the slaughter. —Josephus, Jewish War 7.395 (author's translation)

Robust Optimization Using Training Set Evolution, Tony R. Martinez, Dan A. Ventura

Faculty Publications

Training Set Evolution is an eclectic optimization technique that combines evolutionary computation (EC) with neural networks (NN). The synthesis of EC with NN provides both initial unsupervised random exploration of the solution space as well as supervised generalization on those initial solutions. An assimilation of a large amount of data obtained over many simulations provides encouraging empirical evidence for the robustness of Evolutionary Training Sets as an optimization technique for feedback and control problems.

Heterogeneous Radial Basis Function Networks, Tony R. Martinez, D. Randall Wilson

Faculty Publications

Radial Basis Function (RBF) networks typically use a distance function designed for numeric attributes, such as Euclidean or city-block distance. This paper presents a heterogeneous distance function which is appropriate for applications with symbolic attributes, numeric attributes, or both. Empirical results on 30 data sets indicate that the heterogeneous distance metric yields significantly improved generalization accuracy over Euclidean distance in most cases involving symbolic attributes.

A Robust System For Natural Spoken Dialogue, Eric K. Ringger, James F. Allen, Bradford W. Miller, Teresa Sikorski

Faculty Publications

This paper describes a system that leads us to believe in the feasibility of constructing natural spoken dialogue systems in task-oriented domains. It specifically addresses the issue of robust interpretation of speech in the presence of recognition errors. Robustness is achieved by a combination of statistical error post-correction, syntactically- and semantically-driven robust parsing, and extensive use of the dialogue context. We present an evaluation of the system using time-to-completion and the quality of the final solution that suggests that most native speakers of English can use the system successfully with virtually no training.

A Brief Introduction To Formal Methods, Paul E. Black, Kelly M. Hall, Michael D. Jones, Trent N. Larson, Phillip J. Windley

Faculty Publications

As hardware designs grow in size and complexity, current design methods are proving less adequate. Current methods for specification, design, and test are typically empirical or informal, that is, they are based on experience and argument. Formal methods are solidly based on mathematical logic systems and precise rules of inference. Formal methods offer a discipline which complements current methods so designers can successfully meet the demand for high performance systems. Formal methods covers a broad and diverse set of techniques aimed at improving computer correctness. This paper explains the role of specifications and implementation models in formal methods, and different …

Error Correction Via A Post-Processor For Continuous Speech Recognition, Eric K. Ringger, James F. Allen

Faculty Publications

This paper presents a new technique for overcoming several types of speech recognition errors by post-processing the output of a continuous speech recognizer. The post-processor output contains fewer errors, thereby making interpretation by higher-level modules, such as a parser, in a speech understanding system more reliable. The primary advantage to the post-processing approach over existing approaches for overcoming SR errors lies in its abilityto introduce options that are not available in the SR module’s output. This work provides evidence for the claim that a modern continuous speech recognizer can be used successfully in “black-box” fashion for robustly interpreting spontaneous utterances …