Digital Commons Network^™

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 …

The Past, Present, And Future Of Expressive Freedom Under The Charter, Jamie Cameron

Osgoode Hall Law Journal

More than ten years have passed since the Supreme Court of Canada's first interpretation of the Charter's guarantee of expressive freedom in RWDSU v. Dolphin Delivery. This review of the past, present, and future of expressive freedom under the Charter is in three parts. The first-dealing with the past-traces the evolution of a methodology of expressive freedom in the "first generation" of s. 2(b) jurisprudence. It is followed by an examination of the status of expressive freedom at present, through comments on recent Supreme Court landmarks in Dagenais v. Canadian Broadcasting Corp., Hill v. Church of Scientology of Toronto, and …

The Charter Dialogue Between Courts And Legislatures (Or Perhaps The Charter Of Rights Isn't Such A Bad Thing After All), Peter W. Hogg, Allison A. Bushell

Osgoode Hall Law Journal

This article responds to the argument that judicial review of legislation under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms is illegitimate because it is undemocratic. The authors show that Charter cases nearly always can be, and often are, followed by new legislation that still accomplishes the same objectives as the legislation that was struck down. The effect of the Charter is rarely to block a legislative objective, but rather to influence the design of implementing legislation. Charter cases cause a public debate in which Charter-protected rights have a more prominent role than they would have if there had been no …

Rethinking The Doctrine Of Legitimate Expectations In Canadian Administrative Law, David Wright

Osgoode Hall Law Journal

The author examines recent cases that have transplanted the doctrine of legitimate expectations from British into Canadian law. He concludes that the doctrine has been applied in a confused way in this country, without proper consideration of its "fit" with the Canadian duty of fairness. He argues that the place of the doctrine should be to determine what fairness requires when statements or actions of a decisionmaker have led to a legitimate expectation. The suggestion that it should be an exception to the rule that legislative decisions do not attract the duty of fairness is rejected in favour of a …

1997 : Regulations For Postgraduate Study By Research, 2nd Edition : Pamphlet, Dublin Institute Of Technology

DIT Publications

2nd edition of regulations for postgraduate study by research in DIT. Approved by Academic Council, 14 May 1997.

In both English and Irish.

Adaptive Critic Based Neurocontroller For Autolanding Of Aircraft With Varying Glideslopes, Gaurav Saini, S. N. Balakrishnan

Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

In this paper, adaptive critic based neural networks have been used to design a controller for a benchmark problem in aircraft autolanding. The adaptive critic control methodology comprises successive adaptations of two neural networks, namely `action' and `critic' networks until closed loop optimal control is achieved. The autolanding problem deals with longitudinal dynamics of an aircraft which is to be landed in a specified touchdown region in the presence of wind disturbances and gusts using elevator deflection as the control for glideslope and flare modes. The performance of the neurocontroller is compared to that of a conventional PID controller. Neurocontroller's …

Demonstrating The Need For Health Educators On Short-Term Medical Missions: An Analysis Of Intestinal Parasitic Infections In A Haitian Clinic Population, Janel Jo Brakke

Dissertations and Theses @ UNI

The purpose of this study was to demonstrate the need for health educators on short-term medical missions to developing countries. Specifically, the study was designed to analyze age-specific and gender-specific rates of intestinal parasitic infections in a rural Haitian, mountain clinic population. An extensive review of related literature indicated that 80% of the world's population lives in developing nations, primarily in poverty. Despite the tremendous efforts made by governments and international organizations, the basic health needs of developing nations are not being met (Djukanovic & Mach, 1975; King, 1966; Werner, Thuman, & Maxwell, 1996). Problems of contaminated water, improper sewage …

The Influence Of The Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti On Soviet Foreign Policy During The Cold War, Mark James Curran

Dissertations and Theses @ UNI

The following thesis looks at possible influences of the Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti (KGB) on the formulation and implementation of Soviet foreign policy. The approach taken to analyze this relationship is to evaluate the activities of the KGB during significant historical events occurring during the Cold War. This thesis is divided into chapters, the first of which illustrates the political connection between the KGB and the key governing body of the Soviet Union, the Politburo. The three succeeding chapters individually cover a specific region of the world: Western Europe and the United States, Eastern Europe and Cuba, and the Middle East …

Right-Wing Authoritarianism Relative To Traditional Western Thinking And Locus Of Control, Nadejda Diakonova

Dissertations and Theses @ UNI

The purpose of the present study was to investigate the relationship among right-wing authoritarianism, traditional Western thought and the degree to which subjects tend to perceive themselves as having control over their lives (having internal or external locus of control). It was hypothesized that these three aspects of individuals' cognitive-emotional makeup are interrelated. Three questionnaires were used in the study: the Right-Wing Authoritarianism (RWA) Scale (Altemeyer, 1988), the EastWest Questionnaire (EWQ) (Gilgen & Cho, 1979), and the Locus of Control (LC) Scale (Rotter, 1966). A counterbalanced experimental design was used to control for possible order effects. Duckitt's (1989) conceptualization of …

Numerical Simulations Of Full- Scale Corroded Pipe Tests With Combined Loading, Samit Roy, S. Grigory, M. Smith, M. F. Kanninen, M. Anderson

Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

The ANSI/ASME B31G guideline has been useful to pipeline operators in assessing the integrity of corroded line pipe. Because large safety margins have had to be incorporated, the guidelines can be excessively conservative, which in turn can force costly repairs and replacements that may not actually be necessary. On the other hand, because the current guidelines consider only pressure loading and neglect bending and axial compression, they could give nonconservative failure predictions when combined loading exists. Therefore, a study was initiated to develop a theoretically sound methodology for assessing the integrity of corroded line pipe subjected to combined loading. A …

Analysis Of Rockbolt Reinforcement Using Beam-Column Theory, Samit Roy, Anand B. Rajagopalan

Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

A simple analytical procedure that applies classical beam-column theory for evaluating passive rock bolt roof reinforcement is presented in this paper. The analytical model is derived from first principles and is capable modelling any number of reinforcing bolts. Each rock bolt is modelled as a linear spring and the model allows for non-uniform bolt spacing. In this study the rock beam is assumed to be isotropic and linearly elastic for the sake of simplicity. However, the analytical model can be extended to include anisotropic rock mass as well as inelastic material behavior. The solution to the couped set of governing …

Radiative Heating In Scramjet Combustors, Harlan F. Nelson

Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

Currently, there is considerable interest in scramjet engines for hypersonic aircraft and missiles. This paper presents preliminary calculations of the radiative heating of the walls of scramjet combustion chambers. The analysis assumes isothermal, constant property flow fields that are representative of actual combustor flow fields. The fuel is H2, and N2 is taken as inert. Temperature in the combustor is on the order of 2000-3000 K and the pressure is of the order of 5 atm. The combustion products consist mainly of H2O and OH. These gases are strong radiators in the infrared. Radiation heating can be significant because of …

Integrating Design Into The Sophomore And Junior Level Mechanics Courses, Douglas R. Carroll

Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

Engineering schools across the country are developing ways of integrating design into their curriculum, and a question that often arises is how to best integrate design into the sophomore and junior level courses. Freshman design projects or mechanical dissection courses are designed to give the students hands-on experience in conceptual design and construction, with little if any of the mathematical modeling normally used in engineering design. The capstone senior design project is a true engineering design experience, where students draw from their background to conceptualize, analyze, model, refine, and optimize a product to meet design, manufacturing, and life cycle cost …

Eigenvalue And Eigenvector Determination For Damped Gyroscopic Systems, D. P. Malone, Don L. Cronin, Timothy W. Randolph

Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

No abstract provided.

Measurement Of The Τ Lepton Lifetime With The Three-Dimensional Impact Parameter Method, R. Barate, M. Thulasidas

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

A new method is presented for the measurement of the mean lepton lifetime using events in which are pair-produced and both's decay to hadrons.

Production Of Orbitally Excited Charm Mesons In Semileptonic B Decays, D. Buskulic, M. Thulasidas

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

A sample of 3.6 million hadronic Z decays recorded between 1991 and 1995 with the ALEPH detector at LEP is used to investigate semileptonic decays of B mesons into final states involving orbitally excited charm mesons. Topological vertex criteria are used to search for decays involving narrow D** states as well as wide D** resonances and non-resonant D(*)π final states. The sum of the branching ratios for these processes is measured to be ${⤪ Br}({⩈erline {⤪ B}}⌝ghtarrow {⤪ D}≪ ⫑l^{-}{⩈erline v}) + {⤪ Br}({⩈erline {⤪ B}}⌝ghtarrow {⤪ D}^{⇒t}≪ ⫑l^{-}{⩈erline v})↦op =(2.26 pm 0.29({⤪ stat}) pm 0.33({⤪ syst}))%,$which accounts for a …

Improved Measurement Of The Bd0 -B̄D0 Oscillation Frequency, D. Buskulic, M. Thulasidas

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The time dependence of B0 d {B 0 d oscillations is measured by the ALEPH experiment at LEP, using three techniques, two of which are updates of previous measurements. In all cases the charge of the decaying b quark and its decay time are measured in one hemisphere of the event; the quark charge at production is tagged mainly using the opposite hemisphere. The first method uses the charge correlation between a D and a lepton in the opposite hemisphere; if no lepton is present, the produced quark charge is determined from the hemisphere charges. In the second method, the …

Learning To Use Reader-Response Methods In The Classroom: One Teacher’S Journey Of Change, Marijo Grimes

Dissertations and Theses @ UNI

This study presents a teacher's view of change as the author of this report planned, implemented, and evaluated a change from traditional literature discussion methods to reader-response discussion methods. Louise Rosenblatt's transactional theory of literature provided the basis for developing the instructional plan. This investigation followed a qualitative research plan of self-study. The setting was a seventh grade heterogeneous classroom in a Midwestern school district. During the semester of implementation, the teacher kept daily field notes, collected student papers, evaluated transcripts of video recordings, and completed regular exploratory writing in an attempt to analyze and understand the teacher's role and …

Early British Espionage Fiction And The Differentiation Of Clandestine Realities: A Study In The Paradox Of The Protagonist’S Motivation In Erskine Childer’S The Riddle Of The Sands, Joseph Conrad’S The Secret Agent, John Buchan’S The Thirty-Nine Steps, And Arthur Conan-Doyle’S The Last Bow, Hans-Jörg Grohmann

Dissertations and Theses @ UNI

This thesis offers a phenomenological approach to four examples of early British espionage fiction; by discussing the experiences of four protagonists with their perceptions of reality, the study also gives a reconsideration to the literary essence of the figure of the spy of early British espionage stories. In attempting the combination of phenomenology and espionage fiction, the thesis first of all reviews the canon of criticism on British espionage fiction in general. This review criticizes the dilemma of preceding scholarly contributions, focusing on their general ignorance of the early phase of espionage fiction, which was due to the comparison between …

Droplet Concentration And Size Distribution In Haze And Fog, Josef Podzimek

Physics Faculty Research & Creative Works

Fog (haze) droplet concentrations and size distributions were measured at five sampling sites representing rural and urban regions and a highly polluted marine-urban environment. Droplet imprints in a thin gelatine layer were evaluated and compared to the measurement by light scattering instruments. This enabled conditions for the application of the logarithmic-normal size distribution and for the classification of typical fog droplet size distributions to be established. In particular, the parameters featuring the width and asymmetry of a size distribution were suggested and calculated. Advantages and drawbacks of the applied droplet sampling and evaluation technique are discussed in more detail. © …

Velocity Space "Snapshots" Of Continuum Electrons Produced By Slow, Bare, Highly Charged Ions: Saddle-Point Electrons?, M. Abdallah, S. Kravis, C. L. Cocke, Y. D. Wang, M. Stöckli, Ronald E. Olson

Physics Faculty Research & Creative Works

Comprehensive velocity-space "snapshots" of the electron continua produced by the impact of ions on He at a projectile velocity of 1.63 a.u. have been measured for the bare projectiles of p, He, C, O and Ne. For the three highly charged ions, this velocity lies in the "ionization threshold" region where electron capture dominates the reaction. The experimental technique projects the distribution of soft continuum electrons onto a two-dimensional detector in such a way that the velocity-space distribution for all electrons with laboratory energies in the range from 0-30eV is accurately imaged. The data show no evidence for a saddle-point …

A Whole Range Of Women, Marianne Hartz

Dissertations and Theses @ UNI

A Whole Range of Women is a novel which challenges prevalent notions about the value of many kinds of female creativity. At the beginning of the story, one of the main characters is sculpting a collection of famous North American women. She soon decides she would rather celebrate the creativity exhibited by women in their daily lives. The development of this idea is one of the main themes of the novel. The central focus of each chapter alternates between the lives of three female characters: the above-mentioned sculptor; an English professor who specializes in African-American literature; and, a history professor …

Backpropagation Of Accuracy, Donald C. Wunsch, M. Yu Senashova, Alexander N. Gorban

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

We solve the problem: how to determine maximal allowable errors, possible for signals and parameters of each element of a network, proceeding from the condition that the vector of output signals of the network should be calculated with given accuracy? "Backpropagation of accuracy" is developed to solve this problem

An Object-Based Evolutionary Algorithm For Solving Rectangular Piece Nesting Problems, Kanchitpol Ratanapan, Cihan H. Dagli

Engineering Management and Systems Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

Nesting problems have been tackled by researchers using a vast number of algorithms in the past. Most of the algorithms, however, need to perform on a one-dimensional space. Therefore, the problem must be transformed into a one-dimensional space problem similar to the travelling salesman problem. Consequently, loss of solutions due to the dimensional reduction may occur. In this study, an object-based evolutionary algorithm for rectangular piece nesting problems is proposed. This methodology is created on truly two-dimensional space, allowing new mechanisms (i.e., individual representation, initialization, etc.) and new object-based genetic operators (i.e., hill-climbing, mutation, and recombination operators) to perform effectively …

High-Order Object Model Based Software Analysis, Xiaoqing Frank Liu, Hungwen Lin

Computer Science Faculty Research & Creative Works

The integration of object oriented modeling and structured analysis (SA) for developing a well structured object oriented software system is a challenge for requirements analysts and software designers. Some of the existing object oriented modeling techniques adopt approaches that are very different from SA, and others have clumsily stayed with SA after a few modifications. Our High Order Object Modeling Technique (HOOMT) however, attempts to strike a mean between both extremes while at the same time provides an effective modeling method. HOOMT consists of two models, the High Order Object Model and the Object Information Flow Model. By using the …

Rmesh Algorithms For Parallel String Matching, Hsi-Chieh Lee, Fikret Erçal

Computer Science Faculty Research & Creative Works

String matching problem received much attention over the years due to its importance in various applications such as text/file comparison, DNA sequencing, search engines, and spelling correction. Especially with the introduction of search engines dealing with tremendous amount of textual information presented on the world wide web and the research on DNA sequencing, this problem deserves special attention and any algorithmic or hardware improvements to speed up the process will benefit these important applications. In this paper, we present three algorithms for string matching on reconfigurable mesh architectures. Given a text T of length n and a pattern P of …

Timestamp-Based Approach For The Detection And Resolution Of Mutual Conflicts In Distributed Systems, Sanjay Kumar Madria

Computer Science Faculty Research & Creative Works

We present a timestamp based algorithm for the detection of both write-write and read-write conflicts for a single file in distributed systems during network partitions. Our algorithm allows operations to occur in different network partitions simultaneously. When the sites from different partitions merge, the algorithm detects and resolves both read-write and write-write conflicts without taking into account the semantics of the transactions. Once the conflicts have been detected some reconciliation steps for the resolution of conflicts have also been proposed. Our algorithm will be useful in real-time systems where timeliness of operations is more important than response time (delayed commit)

Short-Term Resource Scheduling With Ramp Constraints [Power Generation Scheduling], Chung-Li Tseng, Chao-An Li, A. J. Svoboda, R. B. Johnson

Engineering Management and Systems Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

This paper describes a Lagrangian relaxation-based method to solve the short-term resource scheduling (STRS) problem with ramp constraints. Instead of discretizing the generation levels, the ramp rate constraints are relaxed with the system demand constraints using Lagrange multipliers. Three kinds of ramp constraints, startup, operating and shutdown ramp constraints are considered. The proposed method has been applied to solve the hydro-thermal generation scheduling problem at PG&E. An example alone with numerical results is also presented

Prediction Of Yarn Strength From Fiber Properties Using Fuzzy Artmap, Raonak Zaman, Donald C. Wunsch

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

The count-strength-product (CSP) of cotton yarn is a complex function of fiber properties and spinning performance. The traditional way of predicting yarn CSP is using linear multiple regression. The correlation coefficient between actual CSP and predicted CSP obtained from linear regression is almost always less than 0.9. In this paper, we used a Fuzzy ARTMAP network to predict yarn CSP from fiber properties and spinning performance. Fiber properties and spinning data were used as inputs to ART_a, and yarn CSP was used as ART_b input. Our objectives are: better prediction of the quality of the end product, …

Scaling Parallels In The Non-Debye Dielectric Relaxation Of Ionic Glasses And Dipolar Supercooled Liquids, David L. Sidebottom, Peter F. Green, Richard K. Brow

Materials Science and Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

We compare the dielectric response of ionic glasses and dipolar liquids near the glass transition. Our work is divided into two parts. In the first section we examine ionic glasses and the two prominent approaches to analyzing the dielectric response. The conductivity of ion-conducting glasses displays a power law dispersion σ(ω)∞ωn, where n≈0.67, but frequently the dielectric response is analyzed using the electrical modulus M*(ω) = 1/ε*(ω), where ε*(ω) = ε(ω) - iσ(ω)/ω is the complex permittivity. We reexamine two specific examples where the shape of M*(ω) changes in response to changes in (a) temperature and (b) ion concentration, to …