Digital Commons Network^™

Tectonic Significance Of The Early Cambrian (And Older?) Eagle Bay Assemblage Vavenby Area South-Central British Columbia, Noah Daniel Hughes

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

No abstract provided.

First Words: An Investigation Of The Nature Of Children's First Word Productions, Susan Cummings

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

No abstract provided.

Model Based Effective Cell Volume Calculation In Ultrasound Tissue Characterization, Di Lai

Theses

In reflective ultrasonic imaging, some statistical parameters can be extracted from the backscattered RF signal. Applying Rayleigh statistics or non-Rayleigh statistics to these parameters, the underlying tissue parameters such as effective scatterer number density that characterize the tissues can be further estimated. However, if the statistical processing is applied to the time domain signal, narrow band excitation pulse needs to be used when we consider the frequency dependency of the backscattered signal. The scattering resolution volume is also difficult to estimate. Chen, et al proposed a different method to determine the frequency-dependent effective scatterer number density, which is the actual …

Armstrong Academics Winter/Spring 2001, Armstrong Atlantic State University

Armstrong State University Collections: Armstrong Academics (Archived)

No abstract provided.

Xenon Excimer Emission From Pulsed Microhollow Cathode Discharges, M. Moselhy, R. H. Stark, K. H. Schoenbach, U. Kogelschatz

Bioelectrics Publications

By applying electrical pulses of 20 ns duration to xenon microplasmas, generated by direct current microhollow cathode discharges, we were able to increase the xenon excimer emission by more than an order of magnitude over direct current discharge excimer emission. For pulsed voltages in excess of 500 V, the optical power at 172 nm was found to increase exponentially with voltage. Largest values obtained were 2.75 W of vacuum-ultraviolet optical power emitted from a single microhollow cathode discharge in 400 Torr xenon with a 750 V pulse applied to a discharge. Highest radiative emittance was 15.2 W/cm². The …

Taas And Gi Forum V. Texas Education Agency: A Critical Analysis And Proposal For Redressing Problems With The Standardized Testing In Texas., Blakely Latham Fernandez

St. Mary's Law Journal

Texas’s use of the Texas Assessment of Academic Skills (TAAS) test as an accountability program has had numerous negative and far-reaching effects on minorities. Today, students in Texas public schools first take the TAAS test in the third grade. Students continue to take a form of the TAAS test each year, with the exit-level assessment initially given in the eleventh grade. Students must pass all four sections–Mathematics, English, Science, and Social Studies–in order to graduate and receive their high school diploma. Although devised to effectively motivate students, schools, and teachers with the goal of enhancing educational standards, the TAAS test …

Securities Price Risks And Financial Derivative Markets, Peter H. Huang

Publications

The financial and popular media report almost daily on the volatility of securities market prices. Yet, many people continue to buy securities to hedge against or speculate on certain risks. People can also buy or sell derivatives to hedge against or speculate on fluctuations in securities prices. This Article discusses three regulatory policy implications of utilizing derivatives markets to reallocate the bearing of securities price risks. First, if there are too few non-redundant derivative markets, a competitive market equilibrium allocation of securities price risks is typically constrained Pareto inefficient. This financial economic result means that for typical economies, a regulator …

Skewness Is The Name Of The Game, Y. H. Cheung

Research outputs pre 2011

Theoretical models of risk taking attempt to explain why risk-averse individuals participate in unfair gambles. This paper evaluates the two explanations as to why rational individuals would accept gambles with negative expected returns. It is found that it is skewness, not the mean or the variance of the prize distribution that attracts risk-averse gamblers. However, evidence shows that there seems to be an optimal trade-off between operators’ sales revenues and skewness of the pay-off; a point that designer of gambling games needs to heed to.

Heckman's Methodology For Correcting Selectivity Bias : An Application To Road Crash Costs, Margaret Giles

Research outputs pre 2011

Aggregate road crash costs are traditionally determined using average costs applied to incidence figures found in Police-notified crash data. Such data only comprise a non-random sample of the true population of road crashes, the bias being due to the existence of crashes that are not notified to the Police. The traditional approach is to label the Police-notified sample as 'non-random' thereby casting a cloud over data analyses using this sample. Heckman however viewed similar problems as 'omitted variables' problems in that the exclusion of some observations in a systematic manner (so-called selectivity bias) has inadvertently introduced the need for an …

On The Evolution Of Probability-Weighting Function And Its Impact On Gambling, Steven Li, Yun Hsing Cheung

Research outputs pre 2011

It is well known that individuals treat losses and gains differently and there exists non-linearity in probability. The asymmetry between gains and losses is highlighted by the reflection effect. The non-linearity in probability is described by the curvature of the probability-weighting function. This paper studies the evolution of the probability-weighting function. It is assumed that the probability weighting for an individual follows a mean-reverting stochastic process. The Monte Carlo simulation technique is employed to study the evolution of the weighting function. The evolution of the probability- weighting function implies that an individual does not treat gains or losses consistently over …

Wetland Vegetation Monitoring, 2000/2001 (Salinity Action Plan), B. Franke, R. Gurner, R. Froend

Research outputs pre 2011

This report represents the vegetation component of a project designed to provide ongoing monitoring of wetland salinity and biological resources in wetlands of the agricultural zone of south-west Western Australia. Maintenance of wetland biological diversity in the agricultural zone is one of the major objectives of the Salinity Action Plan. Due to their low position in the landscape, wetlands are the habitat most affected by salinisation.

Supporting Students With Learning Difficulties In A School Of The Air, Judith Rivalland, Mary Rohl, Pru Smith, Centre For Inclusive Schooling Learning Difficulties Team, Department Of Education

Research outputs pre 2011

This project was funded by Edith Cowan University and the Centre for Inclusive Schooling (Department of Education, formerly Education Department of Western Australia) as an Institute for the Service Professions Collaborative Grant. It was carried out in order to examine the following questions:

• What are the ways in which identification, assessment and teaching processes make provision for students with learning difficulties who are enrolled in a School of the Air?

• In what ways do Support Officers Learning Difficulties support these children, their home tutors and their teachers?

A Case For Systems Thinking And System Dynamics, Craig William Caulfield, Stanislaw P. Maj

Research outputs pre 2011

Systems thinking is a way of thinking that focuses on the relationships between the parts forming a purposeful whole. System dynamics is concerned with building computer models of complex problem situations and then experimenting with and studying the behaviour of these models over time. This paper is a review of systems thinking that considers its unique history and influences, paradigms and methodologies, and presents a case for the system dynamics methodology as the best tool for the most diverse range of problem situations

An Intelligent Imaging Approach To The Identification Of Forensic Ballistics Specimens, Clifton L. Smith

Research outputs pre 2011

The characteristic markings on the cartridge and projectile of a bullet fired from a gun can be recognised as a "fingerprint" for identification of the firearm. Over thirty different features can be distinguished. The intelligent imaging of the class characteristics of ballistics specimens will provide the potential to identify the make and model of the firearm. Precise measurement of features allow ballistics metrics to be obtained for the identification of the weapon. This paper will describe progress in the development of a multidimensional cluster analysis model for forensic ballistics specimens. The cluster analysis will provide classification that is based on …

B-Nodes: A New Scalable High Level Abstraction Model, Stanislaw P. Maj, Craig William Caulfield

Research outputs pre 2011

This paper proposes a new modeling technique called B-Nodes. B-Nodes represent a new, high-level abstraction that allows technical detail to be controlled using top-down recursive decomposition. This abstraction. is independent of architectural detail and can therefore accommodate rapid changes in technology. The use of recursive decomposition allows B-Nodes to be used not only for entire e-commerce system but also sub-modules within this system. The use of fundamental units allows the performance of heterogeneous technologies to be compared and other units to be derived. Results to date indicate no comparable model exists. Should further work validate this technique the authors recommend …

Clustering Of Web Users Using Session-Based Similarity Measures, Jitian Xiao, Yanchun Zhang

Research outputs pre 2011

One important research topic in web usage mining is the clustering of web users based on their common properties. Informative knowledge obtained from web user clusters were used for many applications, such as the prefetching of pages between web clients and proxies. This paper presents an approach for measuring similarity of interests among web users from their past access behaviors. The similarity measures are based on the user sessions extracted from the user's access logs. A multi-level scheme for clustering a large number of web users is proposed, as an extension to the method proposed in our previous work (2001). …

Educating Professional Software Engineers: Pathways And Progress In The Australian Experience, Rick Duley, David Veal, Stanislaw P. Maj

Research outputs pre 2011

Australia has seized the international initiative in the recognition of software engineers as professionals. Of the 37 universities in Australia offering undergraduate courses in computing, eleven offer courses in software engineering which are accredited by the Institute of Engineers, Australia (IEAust) and which may lead the graduate to membership of the Institute. In this way, the Institute has plausible claim to being the first national professional engineering body in the world to have accredited four-year undergraduate software engineering degrees as professional qualifications. The paper traces the development of the relationship between the Institute of Engineers and the computing industry and …

Inference Of Regular Languages Using Model Simplicity, Philip Hingston

Research outputs pre 2011

We describe an approach that is related to a number of existing algorithms for the inference of a regular language from a set of positive (and optionally also negative) examples. Variations on this approach provide a family of algorithms that attempt to minimise the complexity of a description of the example data in terms of a finite state automaton model. Experiments using a standard set of small problems show that this approach produces satisfactory results when positive examples only are given, and can be helpful when only a limited number of negative examples is available. The results also suggest that …

Classification Of Bandlimited Fsk4 And Fsk8 Signals, Visalakshi Ramakonar, Daryoush Habibi, Abdesselam Bouzerdoum

Research outputs pre 2011

This paper compares two types of classifiers applied to bandlimited FSK4 and FSK8 signals. The first classifier employs the decision-theoretic approach and the second classifier is a neural network structure. Key features are extracted using a zero crossing sampler. A novel decision tree is proposed and optimum threshold values are found for the decision theoretic approach. For the neural network, the optimum structure is found to be the smallest structure to give 100% overall success rate. The performance of the both classifiers has been evaluated by simulating bandlimited FSK4 and FSK8 signals corrupted by Gaussian noise. It is shown that …

A Wide Dynamic Range Cmos Imager With Extended Shunting Inhibition Image Processing Capabilities, Farid Boussaid, Amine Bermak, Abdesselam Bouzerdoum

Research outputs pre 2011

A CMOS imager based on a novel mixed-mode VLSI implementation of biologically inspired shunting inhibition vision models is presented. It can achieve a wide range of image processing tasks such as image enhancement or edge detection via a programmable shunting inhibition processor. Its most important feature is a gain control mechanism allowing local and global adaptation to the mean input light intensity. This feature is shown to be very suitable for wide dynamic range imagers

Skin Colour Based Face Detection, Son Lam Phung, Douglas K. Chai, Abdesselam Bouzerdoum

Research outputs pre 2011

This paper describes a new approach to face detection. A colour input image is first processed using neural networks to detect skin regions in the image. Each neural network separates skin and non-skin pixels on the basis of chrominance information. The skin-colour classifier employs the committee machine technique, which improves skin colour detection by combining the classification results of a set of multilayer perceptrons (MLPs). The skin colour classifier achieves a classification rate of 84% compared to 81% for the best individual MLP classifier. The output of the committee machine is processed by a 2D smoothing filter before being converted …

Image Compression Using A Stochastic Competitive Learning Algorithm (Scola), Abdesselam Bouzerdoum

Research outputs pre 2011

We introduce a new stochastic competitive learning algorithm (SCoLA) and apply it to vector quantization for image compression. In competitive learning, the training process involves presenting, simultaneously, an input vector to each of the competing neurons, which then compare the input vector to their own weight vectors and one of them is declared the winner based on some deterministic distortion measure. Here a stochastic criterion is used for selecting the winning neuron, whose weights are then updated to become more like the input vector. The performance of the new algorithm is compared to that of frequency-sensitive competitive learning (FSCL); it …

Skin Color Detection For Face Localization In Human-Machine Communications, Douglas Chai, Son Lam Phung, Abdesselam Bouzerdoum

Research outputs pre 2011

This paper presents the proposed user interface design for computers whereby users can navigate in a 3D graphics scene and change camera viewpoint via head movement. This human-machine communication relies very much on the performance of its face localization module, which must determine head pose and track head movement. We have employed the skin color detection approach to face localization. The approach is studied and presented. The experimental results show that our chosen methodology is very effective. Furthermore, we demonstrate that skin color detection approach can cope with the variations of skin color and lighting conditions

Supporting Beginning Teachers: A Web-Based Collegial Enterprise, Janice Herrington, Anthony Herrington, Arshad Omari, Ron Oliver

Research outputs pre 2011

This paper describes the design, development and evaluation of a website designed to ameliorate many of the problems encountered by beginning teachers. The site allows new teachers, and preservice teachers on school practice, to communicate with each other through a discussion board, and provides access to a range of resources including lesson plans, videos of exemplary teaching, annotated lists of useful websites and frequently asked questions. Such access may help to lessen the feelings of isolation and lack of support felt by many beginning teachers, and provide a link between the practical realities and constraints of the classroom and the …

Application Of Shunting Inhibitory Artificial Neural Networks To Medical Diagnosis, Ganesh Arulampalam, Abdesselam Bouzerdoum

Research outputs pre 2011

Shunting inhibitory artificial neural networks (SIANNs) are biologically inspired networks in which the neurons interact among each other via a nonlinear mechanism called shunting inhibition. Since they are high-order networks, SIANNs are capable of producing complex, nonlinear decision boundaries. In this article, feedforward SIANNs are applied to several medical diagnosis problems and the results are compared with those obtained using multilayer perceptrons (MLPs). First, the structure of feedforward SIANNs is presented. Then, these networks are applied to some standard medical classification problems, namely the Pima Indians diabetes and Wisconsin breast cancer classification problems. The SIANN performance compares favourably with that …

A Compact Multi-Chip-Module Implementation Of A Multi-Precision Neural Network Classifier, Amine Bermak, Dominique Martinez

Research outputs pre 2011

This paper describes a novel MCM digital implementation of a reconfigurable multi-precision neural network classifier. The design is based on a scalable systolic architecture with a user defined topology and arithmetic precision of the neural network. Indeed, the MCM integrates 64/32/16 neurons with a corresponding accuracy of 4/8/16-bits. A prototype has been designed and successfully tested in CMOS 0.7 μm technology

Knowledge-Based Genetic Algorithm For Layer Assignment, Maolin Tang, Kamran Eshraghian, Daryoush Habibi

Research outputs pre 2011

Layer assignment is an important post-layout optimization technique in very large scale integrated circuit (VLSI) layout automation. It re-assigns wire segments in a routing solution to appropriate layers to achieve certain optimization objectives. The paper focuses on investigating the layer assignment problem with application to via minimization, which is known to be NP-complete. A knowledge based genetic algorithm for the layer assignment problem is proposed, with the aim of utilizing domain specific knowledge to speed up the process of evolution and to improve the quality of solutions. Experimental results show that this knowledge based genetic algorithm can consistently produce the …

Novel Image Enhancement Technique Using Shunting Inhibitory Cellular Neural Networks, Tarik Hammadou, Abdesselam Bouzerdoum

Research outputs pre 2011

This paper describes a method for improving image quality in a color CMOS image sensor. The technique simultaneously acts to compress the dynamic range, reorganize the signal to improve visibility, suppress noise, identify local features, achieve color constancy, and lightness rendition. An efficient hardware architecture and a rigorous analysis of the different modules are presented to achieve high quality CMOS digital cameras

The State Of Science In Australian Secondary Schools, Mark W. Hackling, Denis Goodrum, Leonie Rennie

Research outputs pre 2011

Presents research which sets out to establish two pictures: one of the ideal regarding the teaching and learning of science, the other of the reality of what is actually happening in Australian schools. Identifies issues and implications for science teachers and the profession.

The Present Status Of Geography Education In Boys' Intermediate Schools Of Riyadh, Saudi Arabia., Abdulrahman Mohammed Al-Gahtany

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

The purpose of this study was to describe the present status of geography education in boys' intermediate schools in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia as perceived by geography teachers and supervisors; that is, to investigate the objectives, content, methods of teaching, tools and resources that are available and used in classrooms, evaluation techniques, and problems encountered in the teaching of geography. To collect data from this representative sample population, a questionnaire was developed by the researcher specifically for this study. Questionnaire data was collected from 19 social studies supervisors and 213 geography teachers. Percentages, frequencies, means, and standard deviations were computed for …