Digital Commons Network^™

Graded Index And Randomly Oriented Core-Shell Silicon Nanowires With Broadband And Wide Angle Antireflection, P. Pignalosa, H. Lee, L. Qiao, M. Tseng, Y. Yi

Publications and Research

Antireflection with broadband and wide angle properties is important for a wide range of applications on photovoltaic cells and display. The SiOx shell layer provides a natural antireflection from air to the Si core absorption layer. In this work, we have demonstrated the random core-shell silicon nanowires with both broadband (from 400nm to 900nm) and wide angle (from normal incidence to 60o) antireflection characteristics within AM1.5 solar spectrum. The graded index structure from the randomly oriented core-shell (Air/SiOx/Si) nanowires may provide a potential avenue to realize a broadband and wide angle antireflection layer

Stream Recession Curves And Storage Variability In Small Watersheds, Nir Y. Krakauer, Marouane Temimi

Publications and Research

The pattern of streamflow recession after rain events offers clues about the relationship between watershed runoff (observable as river discharge) and water storage (not directly observable) and can help in water resource assessment and prediction. However, there have been few systematic assessments of how streamflow recession varies across flow rates and how it relates to independent assessments of terrestrial water storage. We characterized the streamflow recession pattern in 61 relatively undisturbed small watersheds (1–100 km2 ) across the coterminous United States with multiyear records of hourly streamflow from automated gauges. We used the North American Regional Reanalysis to help identify …

Computational Insight With Monte Carlo Simulations, Boyan Kostadinov

Publications and Research

We introduce Monte Carlo simulations for estimating areas by playing a game of "darts". We also introduce simulations of random walks. We use compact, vectorized programming, based on the R language, for all computer simulations and visualizations, aimed at high school students. This presentation is based on the Invited, prime time lecture given at the summer camp for gifted high school students at City College of New York, July 13, 2011.

Formalizing Reusable Aspect-Oriented Concurrency Control, Neelam Soundarajan, Derek Bronish, Raffi Khatchadourian

Publications and Research

Java and its library provide powerful concurrency control mechanisms. However, their use can lead to similar synchronization code scattered across multiple classes, synchronization and functional code being tangled together, and similar code being duplicated in many applications. Aspect-oriented (AO) programming makes it possible to address these problems. However, the specific behavior of systems built using AO techniques can be challenging to comprehend. We propose a specification approach to precisely express such systems' critical concurrency and synchronization properties. We illustrate the method with a simple example.

New Approach To Teach Product Design That Breaks The Disciplinary Boundaries, Iem Heng, Andy S. Zhang, Farrukh Zia

Publications and Research

This paper presents an initiative and a strategy to teach product design to students in different engineering technology fields through cross departmental collaboration and cooperation between faculty members in the Mechanical Engineering Technology and the Computer Engineering Technology Departments. The work is funded by the National Science Foundation Advanced Technology Education Division (Award No. DUE-1003712) recently awarded to New York City College of Technology. Traditional approach to teach product design in a college setting was mostly confined by disciplinary boundaries. There were very little or no collaborations among various engineering departments. Advances in computer technology and semiconductor electronics have created …

Introduction Of Mechatronic Technology Into Cross-Department Product Design Curricula, Andy S. Zhang, Iem Heng, Sidi Berri, Farrukh Zia

Publications and Research

This paper presents the work that is currently engaged by faculty in the departments of mechanical engineering technology and computer engineering technology to introduce mechatronic technology into product design curricula of both departments. This work is funded by the National Science Foundation (Award No. DUE-1003721) recently awarded to New York City College of Technology. Advances in computer technology and semiconductor electronics have created a new product design field called mechatronics. Mechatronics treats product design as system design that requires the tight integration of mechanical components, electrical/electronic systems, industrial design ideas, computer-control systems, embedded systems, and intelligent software into the product …

“What” And “Where” In Auditory Sensory Processing: A High-Density Electrical Mapping Study Of Distinct Neural Processes Underlying Sound Object Recognition And Sound Localization, Victoria M. Leavitt, Sophie Molholm, Manuel Gomez-Ramirez, John J. Foxe

Publications and Research

Functionally distinct dorsal and ventral auditory pathways for sound localization (WHERE) and sound object recognition (WHAT) have been described in non-human primates. A handful of studies have explored differential processing within these streams in humans, with highly inconsistent findings. Stimuli employed have included simple tones, noise bursts, and speech sounds, with simulated left–right spatial manipulations, and in some cases participants were not required to actively discriminate the stimuli. Our contention is that these paradigms were not well suited to dissociating processing within the two streams. Our aim here was to determine how early in processing we …

Automated Auction Mechanism Design With Competing Markets, Jinzhong Niu

Publications and Research

Resource allocation is a major issue in multiple areas of computer science. Despite the wide range of resource types across these areas, for example real commodities in e-commerce and computing resources in distributed computing, auctions are commonly used in solving the optimization problems involved in these areas, since well designed auctions achieve desirable economic outcomes.

Auctions are markets with strict regulations governing the information available to traders in the market and the possible actions they can take. Auction mechanism design aims to manipulate the rules of an auction in order to achieve specific goals. Economists traditionally use mathematical methods, mainly …

Noncomputable Functions In The Blub-Shub-Smale Model, Wesley Calvert, Ken Kramer, Russell Miller

Publications and Research

Working in the Blum-Shub-Smale model of computation on the real numbers, we answer several questions of Meer and Ziegler. First, we show that, for each natural number d, an oracle for the set of algebraic real numbers of degree at most d is insufficient to allow an oracle BSS-machine to decide membership in the set of algebraic numbers of degree d + 1. We add a number of further results on relative computability of these sets and their unions. Then we show that the halting problem for BSS-computation is not decidable below any countable oracle set, and give a more …

Mathematical Model Of The Dynamics Of Psychotherapy, Larry S. Liebovitch, Paul R. Peluso, Michael D. Norman, Jessica Su, John M. Gottman

Publications and Research

The success of psychotherapy depends on the nature of the therapeutic relationship between a therapist and a client. We use dynamical systems theory to model the dynamics of the emotional interaction between a therapist and client. We determine how the therapeutic endpoint and the dynamics of getting there depend on the parameters of the model. Previously Gottman et al. used a very similar approach (physical-sciences paradigm) for modeling and making predictions about husband–wife relationships. Given that this novel approach shed light on the dyadic interaction between couples, we have applied it to the study of the relationship between therapist and …

A Statistical Method To Correct Radiometric Data Measured By Avhrr Onboard The National Oceanic And Atmospheric Administration (Noaa) Polar Orbiting Environmental Satellites (Poes), Md Zahidur Rahman, Leonid Roytman, Abdelhamid Kadik

Publications and Research

This paper apply an statistical technique to correct radiometric data measured by Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometers(AVHRR) onboard the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Polar Orbiting Environmental Satellites(POES). This paper study Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) stability in the NOAA/NESDIS Global Vegetation Index (GVI) data for the period 1982-2003. AVHRR weekly data for the five NOAA afternoon satellites NOAA-7, NOAA-9, NOAA-11, NOAA-14, and NOAA-16 are used for the China dataset, for it includes a wide variety or different ecosystems represented globally. GVI has found wide use for studying and monitoring land surface, atmosphere, and recently for analyzing climate and …

Melting Trends Over The Greenland Ice Sheet (1958-2009) From Spaceborne Microwave Data And Regional Climate Models, X. Fettweis, Marco Tedesco, M. Van Den Broeke, J. Ettema

Publications and Research

To study near-surface melt changes over the Greenland ice sheet (GrIS) since 1979, melt extent estimates from two regional climate models were compared with those obtained from spaceborne microwave brightness temperatures using two different remote sensing algorithms. The results from the two models were consistent with those obtained with the remote sensing algorithms at both daily and yearly time scales, encouraging the use of the models for analyzing melting trends before the satellite era (1958–1979), when forcing data is available. Differences between satellite-derived and model-simulated results still occur and are used here to identify (i) biases in the snow models …

Memorial To Charles Alexander Baskerville (1928–2009), Allen W. Hatheway, Ajitkumar Shah, Joseph J. Lifrieri, Nazrul I. Khandaker, Stanley Schleifer

Publications and Research

Charles Alexander Baskerville captured our imagination, as a senior colleague in the practice of engineering geology in New York City. “Charlie” held the seat of master Big Apple Geologist during his matured career. He was the source, he knew the possibilities, he was aware of the pitfalls of this most geologically complex of American cities. His final work was his greatest reach—the four bedrock geologic quadrangles of the city. Baskerville mapped New York City for more than fifty years. He was sought and given access to sites of bedrock and bedrock/ overburden interface on the various capitol construction projects undertaken …

Drug Discovery Using Chemical Systems Biology: Weak Inhibition Of Multiple Kinases May Contribute To The Anti-Cancer Effect Of Nelfinavir, Li Xie, Thomas Evangelidis, Lei Xie, Philip E. Bourne

Publications and Research

Nelfinavir is a potent HIV-protease inhibitor with pleiotropic effects in cancer cells. Experimental studies connect its anti-cancer effects to the suppression of the Akt signaling pathway, but the actual molecular targets remain unknown. Using a structural proteome-wide off-target pipeline, which integrates molecular dynamics simulation and MM/GBSA free energy calculations with ligand binding site comparison and biological network analysis, we identified putative human off-targets of Nelfinavir and analyzed the impact on the associated biological processes. Our results suggest that Nelfinavir is able to inhibit multiple members of the protein kinase-like superfamily, which are involved in the regulation of cellular processes vital …

Physical Activity And Hip Fracture Disability: A Review, Ray Marks

Publications and Research

Objective. The present paper examines pertinent literature sources published in the peer-reviewed English language between 1980 and November 1, 2010 concerning hip fractures. The aim was to highlight potential intervention points to offset the risk of incurring a hip fracture and its attendant disability. Methods. An in-depth search of the literature using the key terms: disability, epidemiology, hip fracture, prevention, and risk factors was conducted, along with data from the author's research base detailing the disability associated with selected hip fracture cases. All articles that dealt with these key topics were reviewed, and relevant data were tabulated and analyzed. Results. …

Advances In Optical Biopsy For Cancer Diagnosis, R. R. Alfano

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Experiment In Small-Group Homework Tutoring For Remedial Mathematics Students: Preliminary Results, Alice W. Cunningham, Olen Dias, Nieves Angulo

Publications and Research

This paper presents the preliminary results of an 18-section experiment conducted during the Fall 2010 semester regarding the impact of small-group homework-completion tutoring on the performance of Hostos’ remedial mathematics students. The research in question was performed pursuant to a grant, Improving Undergraduate Mathematics Learning: The Effect of Small-Group Homework Tutoring on Remedial Mathematics Learning, from the CUNY Central Office of Academic Affairs. Permission from Hostos’ Institutional Review Board was granted for the conduct of the experiment and for the dissemination of the results.

Electromagnetic Wave Propagation In Two-Dimensional Photonic Crystals, Oleg L. Berman, Vladimir S. Boyko, Roman Ya. Kezerashvili, Yurii E. Lozovik

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Trust, Privacy, And Frame Problems In Social And Business E-Networks, Part 1, Jeff Buechner

Publications and Research

Privacy issues in social and business e-networks are daunting in complexity— private information about oneself might be routed through countless artificial agents. For each such agent, in that context, two questions about trust are raised: Where an agent must access (or store) personal information, can one trust that artificial agent with that information and, where an agent does not need to either access or store personal information, can one trust that agent not to either access or store that information? It would be an infeasible task for any human being to explicitly determine, for each artificial agent, whether it can …

Linkage Disequilibrium Based Genotype Calling From Low-Coverage Shotgun Sequencing Reads, Jorge Duitama, Justin Kennedy, Sanjiv Dinakar, Yözen Hernández, Yufeng Wu, Ion I. Măndoiu

Publications and Research

Background Recent technology advances have enabled sequencing of individual genomes, promising to revolutionize biomedical research. However, deep sequencing remains more expensive than microarrays for performing whole-genome SNP genotyping. Results In this paper we introduce a new multi-locus statistical model and computationally efficient genotype calling algorithms that integrate shotgun sequencing data with linkage disequilibrium (LD) information extracted from reference population panels such as Hapmap or the 1000 genomes project. Experiments on publicly available 454, Illumina, and ABI SOLiD sequencing datasets suggest that integration of LD information results in genotype calling accuracy comparable to that of microarray platforms from sequencing data of …

Polycationic Glycosides, Robert Engel, Ishrat Ghani, Diego Montenegro, Marie Thomas, Barbara Klaritch-Vrana, Alejandra Castaño, Laura Friedman, Jay Leb, Leah Rothman, Heidi Lee, Craig Capodiferro, Daniel Ambinder, Eve Cere, Christopher Awad, Faiza Sheikh, Jaimelee Rizzo, Lisa-Marie Nisbett, Erika Testani, Karin Melkonian

Publications and Research

Cationic lipids have long been known to serve as antibacterial and antifungal agents. Prior efforts with attachment of cationic lipids to carbohydrate-based surfaces have suggested the possibility that carbohydrate-attached cationic lipids might serve as antibacterial and antifungal pharmaceutical agents. Toward the understanding of this possibility, we have synthesized several series of cationic lipids attached to a variety of glycosides with the intent of generating antimicrobial agents that would meet the requirement for serving as a pharmaceutical agent, specifically that the agent be effective at a very low concentration as well as being biodegradable within the organism being treated. The initial …

Two-Loop Leading Color Corrections To Heavy-Quark Pair Production In The Gluon Fusion Channel, R. Bonciani, Andrea Ferroglia, T. Gehrmann, A. Von Manteuffel, C. Studerus

Publications and Research

We evaluate the two-loop QCD diagrams contributing to the leading color coefficient of the heavy-quark pair production cross section in the gluon fusion channel. We obtain an analytic expression, which is valid for any value of the Mandelstam invariants s and t and of the heavy-quark mass m. Our findings agree with previous analytic results in the small-mass limit and with recent results for the coefficients of the IR poles.

Connections Between Classical And Parametric Network Entropies, Matthias Dehmer, Abbe Mowshowitz, Frank Emmert-Streib

Publications and Research

This paper explores relationships between classical and parametric measures of graph (or network) complexity. Classical measures are based on vertex decompositions induced by equivalence relations. Parametric measures, on the other hand, are constructed by using information functions to assign probabilities to the vertices. The inequalities established in this paper relating classical and parametric measures lay a foundation for systematic classification of entropy-based measures of graph complexity.

Why Don't They Get It?: Academic Intelligence And The Under-Prepared Student As 'Other', Deborah Zalesne, David Nadvorney

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

A View Of The Universe From Siue’S Campus, Aldemaro Romero Jr.

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

\African-Centered Psychology, Education And The Liberation Of African Minds: Notes On The Psycho-Cultural Justification For Reparations, Karanja Keita Carroll, Dereef F. Jamison

Publications and Research

One means through which reparations can be provided to communities of African descent within America is through the creation and institutionalization of culturally enriching after-school programming, African-centered Saturday schools and independent Black educational institutions. Rather than looking to reparations as merely financial compensation for the descendants of the formerly enslaved, we can look to reparations as they relate to the building of educational infrastructures that will impact future generations of African descendants in America. This essay outlines the psychological and epistemological consequences of miseducation that many students of African descent experience within the Eurocentrically orientated education institutions they attend; The …

Flight Control Design For A Tailless Aircraft Using Eigenstructure Assignment, Clara Nieto-Wire, Kenneth Sobel

Publications and Research

We apply eigenstructure assignment to the design of a flight control system for a wind tunnel model of a tailless aircraft. The aircraft, known as the innovative control effectors (ICEs) aircraft, has unconventional control surfaces plus pitch and yaw thrust vectoring. We linearize the aircraft in straight and level flight at an altitude of 15,000 feet and Mach number 0.4. Then, we separately design flight control systems for the longitudinal and lateral dynamics. We use a control allocation scheme with weights so that the lateral pseudoinputs are yaw and roll moment, and the longitudinal pseudoinput is pitching moment. In contrast …

Moving Towards Adaptive Search In Digital Libraries, Udo Kruschwitz, M-Dyaa Albakour, Jinzhong Niu, Johannes Leveling, Nikolaos Nanas, Yunhyong Kim, Dawei Song, Maria Fasli, Anne De Roeck

Publications and Research

Information retrieval has become very popular over the last decade with the advent of the Web. Nevertheless, searching on the Web is very different to searching on smaller, often more structured collections such as digital libraries, local Web sites and intranets. One way of helping the searcher locating the right information for a specific information need is by providing well-structured domain knowledge to assist query modification and navigation. There are two challenges: acquiring the domain knowledge and adapting it automatically to the specific interests of the user community. We will outline how a domain model can be automatically acquired using …

Learning Through Quests And Contests: Games In Information Literacy Instruction, Maura A. Smale

Publications and Research

Games-based learning is an innovative pedagogical strategy employed at all levels of education, and much research in education, psychology, and other disciplines supports its effectiveness in engaging and motivating students, as well as increasing student learning. Many libraries have incorporated games into their collections and program-ming. College and university libraries have begun to use games for information literacy and library instruction. Academic librarians use commercially-produced games, create their own games, and employ game principles and mechanics to enhance their tradi-tional instructional offerings. While there may be impediments to implementing games-based learning for information literacy, the promising benefits of this approach …

Climate Change: The Fork At The End Of Now, Micha Tomkiewicz

Publications and Research

There are many books on global warming written entirely from a layman's perspective, and there is a great deal of scientific literature on this subject. But few if any books attempt to bridge the science to those who lack a rigorous background in mathematics, physics and chemistry-but who may be working on careers in environmental science and policy. The new text is designed to introduce the field of global climate change from a scientific perspective-but written in a way that is accessible to students with some or little science background. It reviews the basic principles of climatic thermodynamics and atmospheric …