Digital Commons Network^™

Reporting Adverse Medical Events In Indiana:, Pamela Whitten, Mohan Dutta, Serena Carpenter, Graham Bodie

RCHE Publications

The purpose of this report is to identify how Indiana news media professionals and Indiana health and medical professionals perceive adverse events and the regulation requiring health and medical professionals to report medical adverse events data to the state. To accomplish this goal, Purdue University researchers conducted an email survey targeting Indiana news media professionals and focus groups with Indiana health and medical professionals. Specifically, the goals of this project were to 1) identify barriers to the medical adverse events regulation and to identify solutions to those barriers, 2) to better understand how the data should be communicated to the …

Reading South African Media Representations Of Islam After 11 September 2001, Gabeba Baderoon

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her paper, "Reading South African Media Representations of Islam after 11 September 2001," Gabeba Baderoon probes the resonances of news representations of 11 September 2001. Baderoon examines the events of that day from the perspective of South Africa, arguing that the international media became located and embodied through the representations of the highly visible and grievable deaths of just under three thousand people in the United States. Her analysis reveals a complex view that derives from the legacy of legislated racial discrimination crafted under the policy of Apartheid as well as the presence of Muslims brought as slaves during …

Textual Strategies To Resist Disappearance And The Mothers Of Plaza De Mayo, Alicia Partnoy

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her paper "Textual Strategies to Resist Disappearance and the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo" Alicia Partnoy draws attention to the ways the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo use literature as both a form of protest and as a way to build solidarity. Focusing on four texts written by the Mothers, Partnoy attempts to correct the lack of attention that this literary work has drawn. Partnoy suggests that in addition to the forms of public protest engaged by the Mothers, their literary activities also play a central role in their efforts. In fact, their use of the literary form …

Piezoelectric Fans Using Higher Flexural Modes For Electronics Cooling Applications, Sydney M. Wait, Sudipta Basak, S V. Garimella, Arvind Raman

CTRC Research Publications

Piezoelectric fans are gaining in popularity as low-power-consumption and low-noise devices for the removal of heat in confined spaces. The performance of piezoelectric fans has been studied by several authors, although primarily at the fundamental resonance mode. In this article the performance of piezoelectric fans operating at the higher resonance modes is studied in detail. Experiments are performed on a number of commercially available piezoelectric fans of varying length. Both finite element modeling and experimental impedance measure- ments are used to demonstrate that the electromechanical energy conversion (electromechanical coupling factors) in certain modes can be greater than in the first …

The Logic And Language Of Torture, Jonathan H. Marks

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his paper "The Logic and Language of Torture," Jonathan H. Marks explores the tragic temptation of torture in the wake of the 11 September 2001 attacks. Emotive responses to terrorism fueled by ticking bomb scenarios and other narrative constructs caused the U.S. to reconsider torture and the boundaries of permissible interrogation tactics in the aftermath of 9/11. While many in the media and the academy debated the necessity of "interrogational torture," the government decided that something more than moral reconstruction was required. For that reason, it embarked on a campaign of legal exceptionalism. While affirming its commitment to the …

Landmines, Hiv/Aids, And Africa's New Generation, Barbara Harlow

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article, "Landmines, HIV/Aids, and Africa's New Generation," Barbara Harlow asks the question what do "humanitarianism" and "human rights" have to do with the humanities? In a globalizing culture, how do personal stories contribute to political histories? What might be the effect of literature on these pressing questions? Harlow focuses in her essay on the work of Swedish writer and Maputo theater director Henning Mankell through particular attention to Secrets in the Fire and Playing with Fire: Two novels about a young Mozambican named Sofia. Harlow shows how Mankell's linking of the experiences of Sofia to the legacy of …

Introduction To Representing Humanity In An Age Of Terror, Sophia A. Mcclennen, Henry James Morello

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.

Collateral Damage And The "Incident" At Haditha, Tom Engelhardt

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his paper, "Collateral Damage and the 'Incident' at Haditha," Tom Engelhardt provides a comparative analysis of the massacres of innocent civilians in the Viet Nam and Iraqi wars. Focusing on the events of My Lai, Haditha, Abu Ghraib, and Fallujah, Engelhardt traces the uncanny resemblance between the ways that the military attempted to contain the flow of information about these atrocities. Engelhardt analyzes the rhetorical tropes of media coverage via the favored terms of "collateral damage" and "incident" and the preferred statistics that always claim that 99.9% of the military conducts itself professionally. The fact that the media not …

A Monk's Tale, Sam Hamill

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his paper, "A Monk's Tale," Sam Hamill recounts his ongoing commitment to using poetry as a form of protest and explains how poetry bridges the personal and the public, weaving together the life of one poet and that of an entire globe. In late January 2003, in response to an invitation to a symposium by Laura Bush to celebrate "Poetry and the American Voice," Hamill declined to participate; a longtime pacifist, he could not in good faith visit the White House following the recent news of George W. Bush's plan for a unilateral "Shock and Awe" attack on Iraq. …

The Tortured Body, The Photograph, And The U.S. War On Terror, Julie Gerk Hernandez

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Julie Gerk Hernandez, in her article "The Tortured Body, the Photograph, and the U.S. War on Terror," engages in an analysis of the institutional mechanisms that lead to dehumanizing violence as a result of the ongoing allegations of torture of detainees at U.S. military bases at Abu Ghraib, in Afghanistan, and at Guantánamo. Hernandez conducts her investigation by examining the photographed torture at Abu Ghraib as an atavistic resurgence of the representational practices at work in post-Civil-War racial lynching. Hernandez also explores the historical and visual parallels between the photographs at Abu Ghraib and the photographs of post-Civil-War lynchings in …

The Black Body And Representations Of The (In)Human, Li-Chun Hsiao

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

Li-Chun Hsiao, in his article "The Black Body and Representations of the (In)human," takes cues from the theoretical insights of Agamben's "bare life" as well as Laclau's and Mouffe's "social antagonism" and explores how the slave can be considered a constitutive element which is nevertheless foreclosed from Western democracies. Hsiao also analyzes the various ways the term "slave" functions as trope in the founding discourses of Western democracy. "Bare life" remains included in politics "in the form of the exception," as "something that is included solely through an exclusion." Such an "inclusive exclusion" is represented not in its differential relationship …

The Global Phenomenon Of "Humanizing" Terrorism In Literature And Cinema, Elaine Martin

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her paper "The Global Phenomenon of 'Humanizing' Terrorism in Literature and Cinema" Elaine Martin presents -- following a discussion of two early examples, Schiller's The Robbers and Heinrich von Kleist's Michael Kohlhaas (1810) -- an analysis of several contemporary works that model different ways of representing terrorism: Heinrich Böll's The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum (1975) and its 1976 filmic adaptation by Volker Schlöndorff, Doris Lessing's The Good Terrorist (1985), Santosh Sivan's film The Terrorist (1999), and Tom Tykwer's film Heaven (2002). Edward Said provided a critique of the battle against terrorism, saying that it is selective ("we" are …

Mass-Mediated Social Terror In Spain, Nicholas Manganas

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his paper, "Mass-Mediated Social Terror in Spain," Nicholas Manganas explores mass-mediated narratives associated with social terror. Manganas posits that one approach to understanding social terror is to conceptualize it as a process of narrativization. Manganas takes a global view while at the same time applying that approach to the contemporary Spanish political and cultural context following the 11 March 2004 terrorist attacks in Madrid. He views the current social and political panorama of Spain as an example of social terror in dialogue with both current and historical national discourses. Manganas details the events surrounding the March 11 attack in …

The Humanities, Human Rights, And The Comparative Imagination, Sophia A. Mcclennen

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her paper "The Humanities, Human Rights, and the Comparative Imagination" Sophia A. McClennen argues that understanding the relationship between culture and human rights depends on humanist perspectives attentive to the relationship between storytelling and identity, mass culture and ideology, text and audience, critical thinking and engaged citizenship. After briefly considering how the divide between the humanities and human rights advocates developed and how it might best be overcome, she suggests that comparative cultural studies grounded in an ethical commitment to study the relationship between culture and society offers an indispensable perspective on the ties between culture and identity integral …

Poetry And The Aesthetic Of Morality, Michael Mcirvin

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his paper "Poetry and the Aesthetic of Morality," Michael McIrvin charts the fall of language from its mythologized acquisition through its use in communal history and ritual to its present diminished function as advertiser's tool and means of control by those in power. The partial exegesis of a poem written in response to the attacks on the World Trade Center and the subsequent US response illustrates that the assignation of otherness on the present grand scale is emblematic of this diminishment. McIrvin argues that President Bush's misspeak leading up to the war and to the last presidential election is …

The Terrorist Event, Bill Nichols

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "The Terrorist Event," Bill Nichols examines how the US media attempted to make meaning of the events of 9/11. How were news anchors and producers to explain an event that escaped their comprehension? Without context or historical equivalence in the US, news outlets groped for a narrative in which to frame the event even if that meant creating the meaning themselves. In their attempt to create meaning, what sorts of fetishes and fantasies did they draw-on and in turn create? The result is that the US excuses itself from its own past and future barbarism as it …

Bearing Witness Through Fiction, Carolina Rocha

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article, "Bearing Witness through Fiction," Carolina Rocha explores the ways in which three Argentine writers grappled with their roles as public intellectuals and witnesses to acts of terror, undeniable violence, and human rights abuses during the most recent military dictatorship. By examining three narrative texts written from the mid-1970s to the late 1990s Aquí pasan cosas raras (Strange Things Happen Here) (1975) by Luisa Valenzuela, La casa y el viento (The House and the Wind) (1984) by Hector Tizón, and El árbol de la gitana (The Tree and the Gypsy) (1997) by Alicia Dujovne Ortiz, she argues that …

Dorfman, Schubert, And Death And The Maiden, David Schroeder

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article, "Dorfman, Schubert, and Death and the Maiden," David Schroeder suggests that the selection of the play's title Death and the Maiden (1991) by Ariel Dorfman is a careful one. Schroeder proposes that it is not only that the title of the piece comes directly from Franz Schubert's String Quartet in D minor, so named because it uses material from the song of the same name as the theme for the second movement. Schroeder argues that Dorfman's thoughtful choice is as much related to the strong parallels between Schubert's Maiden and Dorfman's character Paulina Salas, as to Dr. …

Narration In International Human Rights Law, Joseph R. Slaughter

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his paper, "Narration in International Human Rights Law," Joseph R. Slaughter argues that the prohibitions and entitlements articulated in international human rights law presume and promote an image of the human being as a self-narrating subject. He proposes that human rights law enshrines commitments to the human voice and to the ability of the individual to construct narratives of identity. In this sense, human rights violations can be understood as assaults on the human voice and on the socio-cultural structures that make certain kinds of narratives and narration possible. This narratological reading of the law offers a way to …

Media In A Capitalist Culture, Barbara Trent

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article, "Media in a Capitalist Culture," Barbara Trent looks at the negative effects that capitalism has on the media and how those effects may be overcome. Trent intertwines personal experience with socio-historical context to give the reader a genuine feel for political filmmaking in a Hollywood dominated world. She describes how her Academy Award winning film The Panama Deception was removed from a Cineplex, even after out-grossing all of the other films there, because Warner Brothers wanted the screen. After an examination of the impact a dominant Hollywood has on local culture around the world, Trent offers three …

Artists In Times Of War, Howard Zinn

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article, "Artists in Times of War," Howard Zinn examines the role of the artist during war time and finds that the transcendent nature of art not only shows us the beauty of everyday life, but can also go beyond everyday politics and media hype to critically address the problems of the day. In fact, Zinn suggests that it is the job of artists to "to think outside the boundaries of permissible thought and dare to say things that no one else will say." For Zinn, this is especially important given the intensity of the events of 9/11 where …

Selected Bibliography Of Comparative Studies On Human Rights Culture, Henry James Morello

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.

Provider Centered Coordination, Resource Foraging, And Event Management In Healthcare Tasks, Sandra Kay Garrett

RCHE Publications

The increasing complexity of healthcare and recent awareness of deaths and injuries associated with system errors has made patient safety an issue of national concern. Improving the quality and efficiency of the U.S. healthcare delivery system is a major theme in healthcare engineering, including the research presented in this dissertation.

This research was focused on the task and resource needs of healthcare providers in clinic-based healthcare delivery. The original purpose of this study was to investigate how and when healthcare providers seek the information and resources necessary to deliver effective patient care, but quickly branched out to incorporate more global …

Interacting Systems For Self-Correcting Low Power Switching, Sayeef Salahuddin, Supriyo Datta

Birck and NCN Publications

This letter first shows that dynamic switching schemes can be used to reduce energy dissipation below the thermodynamic minimum of NkT ln r (N=number of information carriers and 1/r=error probability), but only at the expense of the error immunity inherent in thermodynamic processes for which the final state is insensitive to the switching dynamics. It is further shown that, for a system which has internal feedback, e.g., nanomagnets, such that all N spins act in concert, it should be possible to switch with an energy dissipation of the order of kT ln r (considerably less than the thermodynamic limit of …

Quality-Of-Service Routing In Heterogeneous Networks With Optimal Buffer And Bandwidth Allocation, Waseem Sheikh, Arif Ghafoor

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering Technical Reports

We present an interdomain routing protocol for heterogeneous networks employing different queuing service disciplines. Our routing protocol finds optimal interdomain paths with maximum reliability while satisfying the end-to-end jitter and bandwidth constraints in networks employing heterogeneous queuing service disciplines. The quality-of-service (QoS) metrics are represented as functions of link bandwidth, node buffers and the queuing service disciplines employed in the routers along the path. Our scheme allows smart tuning of buffer-space and bandwidth during the routing process to adjust the QoS of the interdomain path. We formulate and solve the bandwidth and buffer allocation problem for a path over heterogeneous …

Adaptation Of Lean Methodologies For Healthcare Applications, Heather (Woodward) Hagg, Deanna Suskovich, Jamie Workman-Germann, Susan Scachitti, Brian Hudson, Joseph Swartz, Chris Vanni

RCHE Publications

Lean and Six Sigma quality concepts and terminology have been applied in the manufacturing arena since the late 1980’s and early 1990’s. It has only been in recent years that healthcare administrators have identified these methods as being adaptable to their organizations so that they may realize organizational improvements for continuing success and delighting customers. Unfortunately, this is not an application that is widely taught in typical Industrial Engineering curriculum and therefore there are few educated professionals coming right out of college that are able to apply these principles to healthcare. There are however, many experienced professionals knowledgeable in the …

An Xml-Based System For Providing Knowledge-Based Grid Services For High-Throughput Biological Imaging, Wamiq Manzoor Ahmed, Dominik Lenz, Jia Liu, J. Paul Robinson, Arif Ghafoor

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering Technical Reports

High-throughput biological imaging uses automated imaging devices to collect a large number of microscopic images for analysis of biological systems and validation of scientific hypotheses. Efficient manipulation of these data sets for knowledge discovery requires high performance computational resources, efficient storage, and automated tools for extracting and sharing such knowledge among different research sites. Newly emerging grid technologies provide powerful means for exploiting the full potential of these imaging techniques. Efficient utilization of grid resources requires the development of knowledge-based tools and services that combine domain knowledge with analysis algorithms. In this paper we first investigate how grid infrastructure can …

Border Feature Detection And Adaptation For Classification Of Multispectral And Hyperspectral Remote Sensing Images, N. Gokhan Kasapoglu, Okan Ersoy

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering Technical Reports

Effective partitioning of feature space for high classification accuracy with due attention to rare class members is often a difficult task. In this paper, the border feature detection and adaptation (BFDA) algorithm is proposed for this purpose. The BFDA consist of two parts. In the first part of the algorithm, some specially selected training samples are assigned as initial reference vectors called border features. In the second part of the algorithm, the border features are adapted by moving them towards the decision boundaries. At the end of the adaptation process, the border features are finalized. The method next uses the …

Provider-Centered Resource Foraging And Data Coordination, Barrett S. Caldwell

RCHE Presentations

The Group Performance Environments Research (GROUPER) Laboratory mission is to be a premier research and development team in the design, evaluation, analysis, and improvement of informated systems on Earth and in space.

Feasibility Of Ddos Attacks With P2p Systems And Prevention Through Robust Membership Management, Xin Sun, Ruben Torres, Sanjay Rao

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering Technical Reports

We show that malicious nodes in a peer-to-peer system may impact the external Internet environment, by causing largescale distributed denial of service attacks on nodes not even part of the overlay system. This is in contrast to attacks that disrupt the normal functioning, and performance of the overlay system itself. We formulate several principles critical to the design of membership management protocols robust to such attacks. We show that (i) pull-based mechanisms are preferable to push-based mechanisms; (ii) it is critical to validate membership information received by a node, and even simple probe-based techniques can be quite effective; (iii) validating …