Digital Commons Network^™

Investigation Of Surrogate Biomarkers Associated With Macular Pigment Status In A Group Of Older Irish Adults, Grainne Scanlon, John S. Butler, Daniel Mccartney, Ekaterina Lostutova, Rose Anne Kenny, James Loughman

Articles

SIGNIFICANCE: Macular pigment (MP) confers potent antioxidant and anti-inflammatory effects at the macula; however, its optical density in the eye is not routinely measured in clinical practice.

PURPOSE: This study explored a range of surrogate biomarkers including anthropometric, clinical, and plasma measures that may be associated with lower MP optical density (MPOD).

METHODS: Two thousand five hundred ninety-four subjects completed a full MP assessment as part of wave 1 of The Irish Longitudinal Study of Aging. Macular pigment optical density was measured using customized heterochromatic flicker photometry. Clinical (blood pressure), plasma (lipoproteins, inflammatory markers), and anthropometric (waist, hip, height, weight) …

An Examination Of Enhanced Atmospheric Methane Detection Methods For Predicting Performance Of A Novel Multiband Uncooled Radiometer Imager, Cody M. Webber, John P. Kerekes

Articles

To evaluate the potential for a new uncooled infrared radiometer imager to detect enhanced atmospheric levels of methane, three different analysis methods were examined. A single-pixel brightness temperature to noise-equivalent delta temperature (NEdT) comparison study performed using data simulated from MODTRAN6 revealed that a single thermal band centered on the 7.68 µm methane feature leads to a detectable brightness temperature difference exceeding the sensor noise level for a plume of about 17 ppm at ambient atmospheric temperature compared to an ambient plume with no enhanced methane present. Application of a normalized differential methane index method, a novel approach for methane …

Uv Photo-Oxidation Of Polybenzimidazole (Pbi), Devon Shedden, Kristen M. Atkinson, Ibrahim Cisse, Shin Lutondo, Tyshawn Roundtree, Michilena Teixeira, Joel Shertok, Michael Mehan, Gregory K. Thompson, Surendra K. Gupta, Gerald A. Takacs

Articles

Since polybenzimidazole (PBI) is often used in the aerospace industry and in high temperature fuel cells, this research investigated the surface modification of PBI film with 253.7 and 184.9 nm UV photo-oxidation. As observed by X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS), the oxygen concentration on the surface increased up to a saturation level of 20.2 ± 0.7 at %. With increasing treatment time, there were significant decreases in the concentrations of C-C sp2 and C=N groups and increases in the concentration of C=O, O-C=O, O-(C=O)-O, C-N, N-O, and N-C=O containing moieties due to 253.7 nm photo-oxidation of the aromatic groups of PBI …

Cleanpage: Fast And Clean Document And Whiteboard Capture, Jane Courtney

Articles

The move from paper to online is not only necessary for remote working, it is also significantly more sustainable. This trend has seen a rising need for the high-quality digitization of content from pages and whiteboards to sharable online material. However, capturing this information is not always easy nor are the results always satisfactory. Available scanning apps vary in their usability and do not always produce clean results, retaining surface imperfections from the page or whiteboard in their output images. CleanPage, a novel smartphone-based document and whiteboard scanning system, is presented. CleanPage requires one button-tap to capture, identify, crop, and …

A Lexical Frequency Analysis Of Irish Sign Language, Robert G. Smith, Markus Hofmann

Articles

Word frequency has a significant impact on language acquisition and fluency. It is often a point of reference for the teaching and assessing of a language and indeed, as a control for psycholinguistic studies. This paper presents the results of the first objective frequency analysis of lexical tokens from the Signs of Ireland corpus. We investigate the frequency of fully lexical, partly lexical and non-lexical signs in Irish Sign Language as they are presented in the corpus. We confirm the accuracy of the lexical gloss frequency data with a supplementary corpus subset that is tagged for grammatical class and additional …

Chromatic Vertex Folkman Numbers, Xiaodong Xu, Meilian Liang, Stanislaw Radziszowski

Articles

For graph G and integers a1 > · · · > ar > 2, we write G → (a1, · · · , ar) v if and only if for every r-coloring of the vertex set V (G) there exists a monochromatic Kai in G for some color i ∈ {1, · · · , r}. The vertex Folkman number Fv(a1, · · · , ar; s) is defined as the smallest integer n for which there exists a Ks-free graph G of order n such that G → (a1, · · · , ar) v . It is well known that if …

Densitometry, Robert Y. Chung

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This chapter covers how a densitometer works. It also covers density-de-rived values and densitometry applications, including pressrun analysis. After reading this chapter, one should know that a densitometer measures light absorption due to the presence of colorants, such as ink and toner. Being sensitive to differences in dark shades, a densitometer is good at measuring colorant amounts, which makes it an ideal tool for printing-process control.

From "Printing-Process Control and Standardization"

Designing Analog Learning Games: Genre Affordances, Limitations And Multi-Game Approaches, Owen Gottlieb, Ian Schreiber

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This chapter explores what the authors discovered about analog games and game design during the many iterative processes that have led to the Lost & Found series, and how they found certain constraints and affordances (that which an artifact assists, promotes or allows) provided by the boardgame genre. Some findings were counter-intuitive. What choices would allow for the modeling of complex systems, such as legal and economic systems? What choices would allow for gameplay within the time of a class-period? What mechanics could promote discussions of tradeoff decisions? If players are expending too much cognition on arithmetic strategizing, could that …

Provost’S Learning Innovation Grant (Plig) For 2019, Esa M. Rantanen

Articles

This grant allowed for a redesign of the PSYC 714 “Graduate Engineering Psychology” course, offered by the Department of Psychology about every two years since 2013, for online delivery. The grant was awarded on March 29, 2019. Full Project Plan report was submitted on Aug. 16, 2019. The majority of the course redesign work was completed during the fall semester 2019 (2191), including creation of several software programs to support the lab exercises designed for the course. The Preliminary Findings report was submitted on Jan. 10, 2020, and the PSYC 714 course was offered online in the spring semester of …

Multi‑View Clustering For Multi‑Omics Data Using Unifed Embedding, Mohammed Hasanuzzaman, Sayantan Mitra, Sriparna Saha

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In real world applications, data sets are often comprised of multiple views, which provide consensus and complementary information to each other. Embedding learning is an effective strategy for nearest neighbour search and dimensionality reduction in large data sets. This paper attempts to learn a unified probability distribution of the points across different views and generates a unified embedding in a low-dimensional space to optimally preserve neighbourhood identity. Probability distributions generated for each point for each view are combined by conflation method to create a single unified distribution. The goal is to approximate this unified distribution as much as possible when …

Using Information Communications Technologies To Implement Universal Design For Learning, David Banes, Anne Hayes, Christopher Kurz, Raja Kashalnagar

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The purpose of this paper is to assist Ministries of Education, their donors and partners, Disabled Persons Organizations (DPOs), and the practitioner community funded by and working with USAID to select, pilot, and (as appropriate) scale up ICT4E solutions to facilitate the implementation of Universal Design for Learning (UDL), with a particular emphasis on supporting students with disabilities to acquire literacy and numeracy skills. The paper focuses primarily on how technology can support foundational skills acquisition for students with disabilities, while also explaining when, why, and how technologies that assist students with disabilities can, in some applications, have positive impacts …

New Bounds On The Real Polynomial Roots, Emil M. Prodanov

Articles

The presented analysis determines several new bounds on the roots of the equation $a_n x^n + a_{n−1} x^{n−1} + · · · + a_0 = 0$ (with $a_n > 0$). All proposed new bounds are lower than the Cauchy bound max $\{ 1, sum_{j=0}^{n-1} | a_j / a_n | \}$. Firstly, the Cauchy bound formula is derived by presenting it in a new light — through a recursion. It is shown that this recursion could be exited at earlier stages and, the earlier the recursion is terminated, the lower the resulting root bound will be. Following a separate analysis, it is …

Italian Sociologists: A Community Of Disconnected Groups, Aliakbar Akbaritabar, Vincent Traag, Alberto Caimo, Flaminio Squazzoni

Articles

Examining coauthorship networks is key to study scientific collaboration patterns and structural characteristics of scientific communities. Here, we studied coauthorship networks of sociologists in Italy, using temporal and multi-level quantitative analysis. By looking at publications indexed in Scopus, we detected research communities among Italian sociologists. We found that Italian sociologists are fractured in many disconnected groups. The giant connected component of the Italian sociology could be split into five main groups with a mixture of three main disciplinary topics: sociology of culture and communication (present in two groups), economic sociology (present in three groups) and general sociology (present in three …

The Data City, The Idiom And Questions Of Locality, Noel Fitzpatrick

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The paper aims to provide both a radical critique of the “smart city” as a techno-ideological apparatus,that through data analysis and algorithmic forms of governmentality tends to colonize space and time, and an attempt to reframe the very concept of intelligence within the smart cities. Two concepts are presented as tools for such a reframing: locality and idiom, where the first is conceived as openness of meaning generated by a territory, while the latter,analysed througha paradigmatic Irish example (Friel’s play Translations), prepares the ground for the pars construensof the paper. The claim, built by intertwining a set of authors (Ricoeur, …

Questions Concerning Attention And Stiegler’S Therapeutics, Noel Fitzpatrick

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The article sets out to develop the concept of attention as a key aspect to building the possible therapeutics that Bernard Stiegler’s recent works have pointed to (The Automatic Society, 2016, The Neganthropocene, 2018 and Qu’appelle-t-on Panser, 2018). The therapeutic aspect of pharmacology takes place through processes that are neganthropic; therefore, which attempt to counteract the entropic nature of digital technologies where there is flattening out to the measurable and the calculable of Big Data. The most obvious examples of this flattening out can be seen in relation to the use of natural language processing technologies for …

Increasing The Trust In Refactoring Through Visualization, Alex Bogart, Eman Abdullah Alomar, Mohamed Wiem Mkaouer, Ali Ouni

Articles

In software development, maintaining good design is essential. The process of refactoring enables developers to improve this design during development without altering the program’s existing behavior. However, this process can be time-consuming, introduce semantic errors, and be difficult for developers inexperienced with refactoring or unfamiliar with a given code base. Automated refactoring tools can help not only by applying these changes, but by identifying opportunities for refactoring. Yet, developers have not been quick to adopt these tools due to a lack of trust between the developer and the tool. We propose an approach in the form of a visualization to …

Modulation Of Medical Condition Likelihood By Patient History Similarity, Jonathan Turner, Dympna O'Sullivan, Jon Bird

Articles

Introduction: We describe an analysis that modulates the simple population prevalence derived likelihood of a particular condition occurring in an individual by matching the individual with other individuals with similar clinical histories and determining the prevalence of the condition within the matched group.

Methods: We have taken clinical event codes and dates from anonymised longitudinal primary care records for 25,979 patients with 749,053 recorded clinical events. Using a nearest neighbour approach, for each patient, the likelihood of a condition occurring was adjusted from the population prevalence to the prevalence of the condition within those patients with the closest matching clinical …

On The Socles Of Fully Inert Subgroups Of Abelian P-Groups, Andrey R. Chekhlov, Peter V. Danchev, Brendan Goldsmith

Articles

We define the so-called fully inert socle-regular and weakly fully inert socle-regular Abelian p-groups and study them with respect to certain of their numerous interesting properties. For instance, we prove that in the case of groups of length ! these two group classes coincide but that in the case of groups of length ! + 1 they differ. Some structural and characterization results are also obtained. The work generalizes concepts which have been of interest recently in the theory of entropy in algebra and builds on recent investigations by the second and third named authors in Arch. Math. Basel (2009) …

On The Relationship Between Developer Experience And Refactoring: An Exploratory Study And Preliminary Results, Eman Abdullah Alomar, Anthony Peruma, Christian D. Newman, Mohamed Wiem Mkaouer, Ali Ouni

Articles

Refactoring is one of the means of managing technical debt and maintaining a healthy software structure through enforcing best design practices, or coping with design defects. Previous refactoring surveys have shown that these code restructurings are mainly executed by developers who have sufficient knowledge of the system’s design, and disposing of leadership roles in their development teams. However, these surveys were mainly limited to specific projects and companies. In this paper, we explore the generalizability of the previous results though analyzing 800 open-source projects. We mine their refactoring activities, and we identify their corresponding contributors. Then, we associate an expertise …

Asynchronous Assistance: A Social Network Analysis Of Influencing Peer Interactions In Peerwise, Tomas Shields, Geraldine Gray, Barry J. Ryan

Articles

This mixed methods, investigative case study explored student patterns of use within the online PeerWise platform to identify the most influencing activities and to build a model capable of predicting performance based on these influencing activities. Peerwise is designed to facilitate student peer-to-peer engagement through creating, answering and ranking multiple choice questions; this study sought to understand the relationship between student engagement in Peerwise and learning performance. To address the research question, various usage metrics were explored, visualized and modelled, using social network analysis with Gephi, Tableau and Python. These findings were subsequently analyzed in light of the qualitative survey …

An Application Of Machine Learning To Explore Relationships Between Factors Of Organisational Silence And Culture, With Specific Focus On Predicting Silence Behaviours, Stephen Barrett Dr

Articles

Research indicates that there are many individual reasons why people do not speak up when confronted with situations that may concern them within their working environment. One of the areas that requires more focused research is the role culture plays in why a person may remain silent when such situations arise. The purpose of this study is to use data science techniques to explore the patterns in a data set that would lead a person to engage in organisational silence. The main research question the thesis asks is: Is Machine Learning a tool that Social Scientists can use with respect …

Fabrication Of Polymer Monoliths Within The Confines Of Non-Transparent 3d-Printed Polymer Housings, Noor Abdulhussain, Suhas H. Nawada, Sinéad Currivan, Marta Passamonti, Peter J. Schoenmakers

Articles

In the last decade, 3D-printing has emerged as a promising enabling technology in the field of analytical chemistry. Fused-deposition modelling (FDM) is a popular, low-cost and widely accessible technique. In this study, RPLC separations are achieved by in-situ fabrication of porous polymer monoliths, directly within the 3D-printed channels. Thermal polymerization was employed for the fabrication of monolithic columns in optically non-transparent column housings, 3D-printed using two different polypropylene materials. Both acrylate-based and polystyrene-based monoliths were created. Two approaches were used for monolith fabrication, viz. (i) in standard polypropylene (PP) a two-step process was developed, with a radical initiated wall-modification step …

Assessing The Market Niche Of Eurasian Rail Freight In The Belt And Road Era., Xu Zhang, Hans-Joachim Schramm

Articles

This paper presents an overview of the recent development of Eurasian rail freight in the Belt and Road era and further evaluates its service quality in terms of transit times and transport costs compared to other transport modes in containerised supply chains between Europe and China.

A trade-off model of transit time and transport costs based on quantitative data from primary and secondary sources is developed to demonstrate the market niche for Eurasian rail freight vis-a-vis the more established modes of transport of sea, air, and sea/air. In a scenario analysis, further cargo attributes influencing modal choice are employed to …

Toward The Automatic Classification Of Self-Affirmed Refactoring, Mohamed Wiem Mkaouer, Eman Abdullah Alomar, Ali Ouni

Articles

The concept of Self-Affirmed Refactoring (SAR) was introduced to explore how developers document their refactoring activities in commit messages, i.e., developers explicit documentation of refactoring operations intentionally introduced during a code change. In our previous study, we have manually identified refactoring patterns and defined three main common quality improvement categories including internal quality attributes, external quality attributes, and code smells, by only considering refactoring-related commits. However, this approach heavily depends on the manual inspection of commit messages. In this paper, we propose a two-step approach to first identify whether a commit describes developer-related refactoring events, then to classify it according …

How Do Developers Refactor Code To Improve Code Reusability?, Eman Abdullah Alomar, Philip T. Rodriguez, Jordan Bowman, Tianjia Wang, Benjamin Adepoju, Kevin Lopez, Christian D. Newman, Ali Ouni, Mohamed Wiem Mkaouer

Articles

. Refactoring is the de-facto practice to optimize software health. While there has been several studies proposing refactoring strategies to optimize software design through applying design patterns and removing design defects, little is known about how developers actually refactor their code to improve its reuse. Therefore, we extract, from 1,828 open source projects, a set of refactorings which were intended to improve the software reusability. We analyze the impact of reusability refactorings on state-of-the-art reusability metrics, and we compare the distribution of reusability refactoring types, with the distribution of the remaining mainstream refactorings. Overall, we found that the distribution of …

An Exploratory Study On How Software Reuse Is Discussed In Stack Overflow, Mohamed Wiem Mkaouer, Eman Abdullah Alomar, Jiaqian Liu, Ali Ouni, Christian D. Newman, Diego Barinas

Articles

Software reuse is an important and crucial quality attribute in modern software engineering, where almost all software projects, open source or commercial, no matter small or ultra-large, source code reuse in one way or another. Although software reuse has experienced an increased adoption throughout the years with the exponentially growing number of available third-party libraries, frameworks and APIs, little knowledge exists to investigate what aspects of code reuse developers discuss. In this study, we look into bridging this gap by examining Stack Overflow to understand the challenges developers encounter when trying to reuse code. Using the Stack Overflow tags “code-reuse” …

How We Refactor And How We Document It? On The Use Of Supervised Machine Learning Algorithms To Classify Refactoring Documentation, Eman Abdullah Alomar, Anthony Peruma, Mohamed Wiem Mkaouer, Christian D. Newman, Marouane Kessentini, Ali Ouni

Articles

Refactoring is the art of improving the structural design of a software system without altering its external behavior. Today, refactoring has become a well-established and disciplined software engineering practice that has attracted a significant amount of research presuming that refactoring is primarily motivated by the need to improve system structures. However, recent studies have shown that developers may incorporate refactoring strategies in other development-related activities that go beyond improving the design especially with the emerging challenges in contemporary software engineering. Unfortunately, these studies are limited to developer interviews and a reduced set of projects. To cope with the above-mentioned limitations, …

Undergraduate Textbook Representations Of Meiosis Neglect Essential Elements, Leslie Kate Wright, Grace Elizabeth C. Dy, Dina L. Newman

Articles

The process of meiosis is an essential topic that secondary and postsecondary students struggle with. The important meiosis-related concepts of homology, ploidy, and segregation can be described using the DNA Triangle framework, which connects them to the multidimensional nature of DNA (chromosomal, molecular, and informational levels). We have previously established that undergraduate biology students typically fail to describe and/or link appropriate levels to their explanations of meiosis. We hypothesize that students' understanding mirrors the resources they are given – in other words, textbook figures often lack many of the important connections that experts include when talking about meiosis. Prior work …

A Model For The Spread Of Infectious Diseases In A Region, Elizabeth Hunter, Brian Mac Namee, John D. Kelleher

Articles

In understanding the dynamics of the spread of an infectious disease, it is important to understand how a town’s place in a network of towns within a region will impact how the disease spreads to that town and from that town. In this article, we take a model for the spread of an infectious disease in a single town and scale it up to simulate a region containing multiple towns. The model is validated by looking at how adding additional towns and commuters influences the outbreak in a single town. We then look at how the centrality of a town …

Simulating Cement Hydration Using Hydcem, Niall Holmes, Denis Kelliher, Mark Tyrer

Articles

HYDCEM is a new cement hydration model to simulate volumetric changes and predict phase assemblage, degree of hydration, heat release, compressive strength and chemical shrinkage over time for PC and limestone binders undergoing hydration for any w/c ratio and curing temperatures between 5 and 45 °C. While models should never completely remove experimental analysis, they are an aid to better understand cement hydration and microstructure development by allowing users analyse different binders in a relatively short time. HYDCEM, written in MATLAB®, is aimed at complementing more sophisticated thermodynamic models giving users a reasonable prediction of hydration behaviour over time, using …