Digital Commons Network^™

Using Remote Sensing To Search For The Elusive Fort Maurepas Along The Back Bay Of Biloxi, Pollyanna Held

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

No abstract provided.

Numerical Analysis Of Fresnel Zone Plate Antennas, Sasikanth Devulapalli

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

No abstract provided.

Dyadic Green's Functions Of Circular Waveguides With Application To Excitation And Scattering Problems, Victor Klymko

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

No abstract provided.

The Inevitability Of Aggregate Settlement: An Institutional Account Of American Tort Law, Samuel Issacharoff, John Fabian Witt

Faculty Articles

In the courts and in the academy, the ostensible commitment of American tort law to individualized justice has experienced a sustained revival in recent years. Neither the modern mass tort case-law nor the scholarly literature, however, has adequately grappled with longstanding practices of de facto aggregation that have sprung up in the shadow of American tort law since the very beginnings of tort as a field. Reviewing more than a century of private aggregation from employers' liability to automobile accident litigation to the modern asbestos cases, this Article contends that American tort practice has been characterized almost from the start …

Analysis And Design Of Coplanar Waveguide Fed Undirectional Slot Antennas With Wide Radiating Apertures, Venugopal Chennupati

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

No abstract provided.

Where To Draw The Line?: Judicial Review Of Political Gerrymanders, Samuel Issacharoff, Pamela S. Karlan

Faculty Articles

A striking feature of the post-2000 redistricting is not only the continued - indeed, ever-increasing - vigor of partisan line drawing, but the array of doctrinal tools litigators and courts have invoked in attempts to rein it in: Article I; the First Amendment; the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment in a wide range of flavors; the Voting Rights Act of 1965; and a variety of state-law principles. We offer a preliminary reaction to the Court's decisions in Vieth v. Jubelirer, 124 S.Ct. 1769 (2004), and Cox v. Larios, 124 S.Ct. 2806 (2004), that places those decisions in the …

Munazza’S Story: Shedding Light On A Science Teacher’S Conceptions Of The Nature Of Science Through A Life History Study, Nelofer Halai, Derek Hodson

Institute for Educational Development, Karachi

Life history research creates a broader understanding of teaching by providing illustration of the relationships among various aspects of teachers’ lives and their teaching practice, both inside and beyond the classroom. This article focuses on the life history of Munazza, a young science teacher at the Karachi Model Secondary School (KMSS), a private, co‐educational, English‐medium school for children from middle‐income families. Its purpose is to gain insight into a female science teacher's understanding of teaching science in a school in Pakistan, ascertain what aspects of this science teacher's conceptions of the nature of science are explicit in her practice, and …

Improving Practices In Early Childhood Classroom In Pakistan: Issues And Challenges From Field, Audrey Juma

Institute for Educational Development, Karachi

This article focuses on an early childhood programme that has been initiated by the Institute for Educational Development at the Aga Khan University in Karachi, Pakistan. The programme is a Certificate in Education and involves training teachers so as to enable them to understand early childhood education and development, and to become effective practitioners in their classrooms. The early childhood education and development programme is a field-based programme of six months’ duration, where the emphasis is on supporting and mentoring course participants as they implement the High/Scope approach in their classrooms and engage children in active learning. The article outlines …

The Implementation Of National Science Education Standards By Ninth Grade Science Teachers In Northeast Iowa, Richard Hofmeyer

Graduate Research Papers

A battle is occurring for the hearts and minds of the science teachers of this country. On one side are the constructivist methods (inquiry-based science) put forward by the science education reformers, which are a paradigm shift in the methods and curricula of most science classrooms in this country, while the other side contains the traditional methods and curricula generally in use today, espoused by many science teachers, administrators, school board members, and parents. Although this appears to be a yes-or-no question-'Has the science teacher switched to constructivist methods?'-it is more involved than that. An entire continuum scale exists between …

Market Bubbles And Wasteful Avoidance: Tax And Regulatory Constraints On Short Sales, Michael R. Powers, David M. Schizer, Martin Shubik

Faculty Scholarship

In recent years, a speculative bubble in Internet stocks has burst and several "blue chip" firms have failed amidst high profile allegations of corporate misconduct. Why did high-tech start-ups with no earnings attain such lofty valuations? Why didn't sophisticated investors keep prices at saner levels? And why didn't more sophisticated investors look past accounting gimmicks much earlier to uncover problems at Enron and other firms? More generally, why did the mechanisms of market efficiency prove inadequate? While there obviously is no single answer to these complex questions, this Article focuses on one piece of the problem: U.S. tax and regulatory …

Restoring The Individual Plaintiff To Tort Law By Rejecting ‘Junk Logic’ About Specific Causation, Vern R. Walker

Hofstra Law Faculty Scholarship

Judges are removing the individual plaintiffs from many torts cases, and are instead conducting fact-finding about abstract statistical individuals. But the reasoning about specific causation in those cases is often fallacious. This Article critiques the error by analyzing direct inferences from causal generalizations about groups to probabilistic conclusions about causation in individuals. It identifies six distinct types of uncertainty in such inferences: measurement uncertainty, sampling uncertainty, modeling uncertainty, causal uncertainty, uncertainty about plaintiff representativeness, and uncertainty about assigning a probability to a specific plaintiff. These six uncertainties are logically necessary to this type of inference, and are not peculiar to …

Domain Knowledge And The Teaching Of Creative Legal Problem Solving, Stefan H. Krieger

Hofstra Law Faculty Scholarship

This article explores the relationship between students' knowledge of underlying legal doctrine and their ability to learn effective methods of practice in law school skills courses. One of the primary goals of skills training in law school, especially clinical legal education, is to teach students how to apply what they have learned in doctrinal courses in the “real world.” While much has been written about training students in proper methods of practice and problem solving in skills courses, little attention has been paid to the significance of doctrinal knowledge to this training. Reviewing recent cognitive psychology research on the development …

Resolving The Dilemma Of Minority Representation, Grant M. Hayden

Hofstra Law Faculty Scholarship

This article proposes that recent work in philosophy on the issue of interpersonal utility comparisons may be used to help resolve a significant problem in minority representation. The creation of majority-minority districts has had the unintended consequence of forcing minority voting rights advocates to choose between increasing the number of minority officeholders and increasing the number of Democrats. This dilemma is, in part, due to the strict application of the one person, one vote standard. But work on the issue of interpersonal utility comparisons tells us that the one person, one vote standard is not the objective standard it purports …

Fixing The Hole In The Ozone Layer: A Success In The Making (Continued), Drusilla J. Hufford, Paul Horwitz

Articles

No abstract provided.

Better Foreground Segmentation Through Graph Cuts, Nicholas Howe, Alexandra Deschamps

Computer Science: Faculty Publications

For many tracking and surveillance applications, background subtraction provides an effective means of segmenting objects moving in front of a static background. Researchers have traditionally used combinations of morphological operations to remove the noise inherent in the background-subtracted result. Such techniques can effectively isolate foreground objects, but tend to lose fidelity around the borders of the segmentation, especially for noisy input. This paper explores the use of a minimum graph cut algorithm to segment the foreground, resulting in qualitatively and quantitiatively cleaner segmentations. Experiments on both artificial and real data show that the graphbased method reduces the error around segmented …

Java-Based Digital Library Portal For Geography Education, Zehua Liu, Hai Yuan, Ee Peng Lim, Ming Yin, Dion Hoe-Lian Goh, Yin-Leng Theng, Wee-Keong Ng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

G-Portal is a Java-based digital library system for managing the metadata of geography related resources on the Web. In addition to providing a flexible repository subsystem to accommodate metadata of different formats using XML and XML Schemas, G-Portal organizes metadata into projects and layers, and supports an integrated and synchronized classification and map-based interfaces over the stored metadata. G-Portal also includes a classification subsystem that creates category structures and classifies metadata resources into categories based on user-specified classification schemas. Furthermore, G-Portal users can annotate resources and make their annotations available to others. In this paper, we describe the design and …

Supply Chains Integration: Architecture And Enabling Technologies, Keng Siau, Yuhong Tian

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

An effective and efficient supply chain is vital to the competitiveness and the survival of an organization. With the emergence of the e-business era, supply chain systems need to be able to extend beyond the traditional boundaries. This paper proposes integrated supply chain architecture (SCA) that combines the benefits of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and the various supply chain applications. Some necessary criteria for an integrated supply chain include completeness, security, flexibility, scalability, and interoperability. The enabling technologies for such a supply chain system include XML, DCOM, CORBA, SOAP, Net, and Semantic Web. Wireless and mobile technologies could further extend …

What Do You Mean, Rhetoric Is Epistemic?, William D. Harpine

Faculty Publications

The thesis that rhetoric is epistemic has gained widespread acceptance and has influenced rhetorical theory. The thesis suggests that argumentative justification in rhetorical contexts is fundamentally epistemic. Unfortunately, however, much of the literature developing the thesis has employed vague or inconsistent definitions of key terms, resulting in theoretical errors and needless complications. This essay clarifies the definitions of “rhetoric,” “knowledge,” and “certainty,” showing how the notion that rhetoric is epistemic might be developed in a clearer and more useful way.

University Of Central Florida 2003-2004 Fact Book, University Of Central Florida

Historical Fact Book and Enrollment

Historical fact book and enrollment data for the University of Central Florida.

Copyright And Information Theory: Toward An Alternative Model Of Authorship, Alan L. Durham

Articles

Both literary scholars and students of copyright law have challenged the romantic model of authorship a model emphasizing individual genius and creation ex nihilo Authorship they argue is actually a collaborative effort Authors assemble their works from the fragments of their cultural environment transforming as much as creating Copyright law however still champions the rights of authors and it requires a coherent theory of what authorship is An alternative to the romantic model of authorship can be found in information theory a branch of mathematics dealing at a very fundamental level with all forms of communication Authorship could be defined …

Theory And History Of Social Indicators With Demonstration, David Edward Roemer

Master's Projects

This planning report outlines the history and evolution of social indicators into community indicators and examines their use in regional and urban planning. Second, this planning report is a study of the uses and types of indicators that have been, and are being, used for planning at the regional and community level. As such, this report also examines what it means for indicators to be appropriate” and describes how they may also be misused. Third, this report demonstrates the recreation of a Santa Clara County social indicator index based on a 1984 published report updated to the year 2000. The …

Viscors: A Visual-Content Recommender For The Mobile Web, Chan Young Kim, Jae Kyu Lee, Yoon Ho Cho, Deok Hwan Kim

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Current search methods for mobile-Web content can be frustrating to use. To shorten searches for cell phone wallpaper images, VISCORS combines collaborative filtering with content-based image retrieval. An increasing selection of content is becoming available in the mobile-Web environment, where users navigate the Web using wireless devices such as cell phones and PDAs. The fast growth and excellent prospects of the mobile-Web content market have attracted many content providers.

Incremental Genetic K-Means Algorithm And Its Application In Gene Expression Data Analysis, Yi Lu, Shiyong Lu, Farshad Fotouhi, Youping Deng, Susan J. Brown

Wayne State University Associated BioMed Central Scholarship

Abstract

Background

In recent years, clustering algorithms have been effectively applied in molecular biology for gene expression data analysis. With the help of clustering algorithms such as K-means, hierarchical clustering, SOM, etc, genes are partitioned into groups based on the similarity between their expression profiles. In this way, functionally related genes are identified. As the amount of laboratory data in molecular biology grows exponentially each year due to advanced technologies such as Microarray, new efficient and effective methods for clustering must be developed to process this growing amount of biological data.

Results

In this paper, we propose a new clustering …

Law School Catalog 2004, Wiener-Rogers Law Library, University Of Nevada, Las Vegas -- William S. Boyd School Of Law

Law School Catalogs

No abstract provided.

Discrete Approximations And Necessary Optimality Conditions For Functional-Differential Inclusions Of Neutral Type, Boris S. Mordukhovich, Lianwen Wang

Mathematics Research Reports

This paper deals with necessary optimality conditions for optimal control systems governed by constrained functional-differential inclusions of neutral type. While some results are available for smooth control systems governed by neutral functional-differential equations, we are not familiar with any results for neutral functional-differential inclusions, even with smooth cost functionals in the absence of endpoint constraints. Developing the method of discrete approximations and employing advanced tools of generalized differentiation, we conduct a variational analysis of neutral functional-differential inclusions and obtain new necessary optimality conditions of both Euler-Lagrange and Hamiltonian types.

Measuring Educational Gains And Setting Consequences: Charter Schooling And The No Child Left Behind Policy, Erin Lyttle

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The charter school movement and the federal legislation No Child Left Behind (2001) have put a process in motion through which parents and students can opt out of the established public education system. This thesis is an in-depth study of one Pittsburgh charter school within the context of a critique of public education in American history. Empirical data was collected through a triangulated research design, which included interviews, surveys, field observations, and content analysis.

Determining the features of a charter school that make classroom dynamics more or less effective than those in traditional public schools was the original micro-level focus …

Optimization Techniques For Image Restoration, Melissa Pirolli

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Many fields of study use images to make discoveries about the past, decisions for the present and predictions for the future. Images often acquire degradations such as a blur due to a patient moving during an x-ray or noise picked up through remote sensing imaging equipment. Images may also lose information through compression or

transmission. In this thesis, diffusion based models were used to solve the image restoration problem as these models can simultaneously remove noise, preserve edges and restore lost information. Specifically, numerical schemes were developed and tested for denoising via nonstandard diffusion that are more computationally efficient than …

Development, Research And Validation Of Environmental Speciation Methods; And Evaluation By Speciated Isotope Dilution Mass Spectrometry In Mercury And Chromium Speciation Analysis, G. M. Mizanur Rahman

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The toxicity of an element depends upon its chemical forms, which also gives vital information for samples and their relevance. A sequential extraction method for mercury speciation in soil and sediments was established based on the mobility and toxicity of different mercury species and was proposed as a draft US EPA Method 3200. In order to finalize the method, an interlaboratory validation study was performed, and the final results verified the applicability of the method. Some of the widely used mercury speciation methods were evaluated during this study and the results were compared with those obtained from EPA draft Method …

An Examination Of Standardized Language, Mathematics, And Reading Achievement Testing Results When Compared For Middle School Aged Student Leaders And Non-Student Leaders, Susan Schaming

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The evolution of the middle school concept, according to Forte and Schurr (2003), with its own identity and its subsequent implementation, has proven to be an ideal or preferred model for educating students. Knowles and Brown (2000) assert the importance of middle level teachers' ability to nurture their students' academic, emotional, personal, and social development during the often "chaotic" years of transescence and early adolescence.

This study examined and explored sixty-four randomly selected seventh grade middle school students' earned scores on their annual standardized achievement testing, particularly the Terra Nova II Multiple Assessments subtests in the areas of Language, Mathematics, …

The Impact Of Utilizing High-Fidelity Computer Simulation On Critical Thinking Abilities And Learning Outcomes In Undergraduate Nursing Students, Lori Schumacher

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Critical thinking abilities and learning outcomes are major components of nursing education. Initial critical thinking skills are often gained while the nursing student is learning the theoretical nursing principles in the classroom and is further enhanced in the clinical setting where learned knowledge is applied. A variety of instructional strategies are utilized to facilitate learning and promote critical thinking. Through the utilization of three complex and dynamic conceptual models, this study compared critical thinking abilities and learning outcomes of beginning baccalaureate undergraduate nursing students when three instructional strategies were used (classroom, simulation, and a combination of classroom and simulation).

A …