Digital Commons Network^™

The Application Of Learning Skills In An Engineering Programme, Leslie Shoemaker

Level 3

At the Dublin Institute of Technology, an engineering programme in the School of Control Systems and Electrical Engineering has successfully incorporated a study skills module into the core curriculum. The module, titled Academic Development and Key Skills, is part of the first year of the programme and has a two-fold purpose. Primarily the goal is to assist the students with the transition from second level education to third level by teaching them a more competent learning style. This, in turn, helps to create a positive impact with respect to the retention of this student group within the programme. The second …

Port Community Learning Needs: Analysis And Design, Edward Sweeney, Pietro Evangelista

Articles

The port industry is facing a dramatic wave of changes that have transformed the structure of the
industry. Modern seaports are increasingly shifting from a “hardware-based” approach towards “knowhow intensive” configuration. In this context knowledge resources, learning processes and training initiatives increasingly represent key elements to guarantee the quality of service supplied and hence the competitiveness of modern seaport communities. This paper describes the learning needs analysis conducted amongst key port community actors in three ports in the south east of Ireland during 2005 in the context of the I-Sea.Net project. It goes on to describe the learning requirements report …

Outsourcing: An Irish Perspective, Aoife O'Riordan, Edward Sweeney

Conference papers

This paper investigates three case studies with regards their outsourcing initiatives from an Irish perspective, the benefits and problems they encountered, the contracts they have constructed, and where they have outsourced and the reasons behind them. The research took place over a period of two years, and the information for the case studies was gleaned from a number of sources including: published papers about the companies, the company websites, annual financial reports, the questionnaire they filled out, and interviews with key decision making personnel in the company. Follow up interviews were conducted where it was felt they were required. Key …

Blended Problem-Based Learning For Teacher Education: Lessons Learnt, Roisin Donnelly

Journal Articles

Journal of Learning, Media and Technology, Vol. 31, 2, 2006, pp. 93-116

Available from the Publisher http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/17439880600756621

What Is Required To Optimise Professional Development Opportunities For Academic Staff In A Specific College In The Further Education Sector?, Anne O'Donohue

Theses

The main aim of this research was to identify what was required to optimise professional development for the academic staff of Liberties College, a college in the further education sector. This research was a case study, focusing on the micro, one case on one site, with the emphasis on understanding the unity and the wholeness of this particular case. The theoretical perspective applied therefore, was constructionist and the research methods interpretive in design.

The research design was mainly qualitative though there was also a quantitative element in part of the questionnaire which was followed up by semi-structured interviews. The relevant …

Can Blending Face-To-Face Teaching With E-Learning Support The Development Of Phase 4 Apprentices In Mathematics? A Formative Evaluation Research Study., Peter Hinch

Theses

This thesis is a formative evaluation research study. Its purpose is to establish if blending face-to-face and e-learning delivery methods can support the development of Phase 4 apprentice plumbers in mathematics in the Department of Construction Skills in the Technologicl University Dublin. The study also included the design, development and evaluation of a mathematics web site called Plumatics 4 U which is grounded in established theoretical criteria for effective blended delivery within third level education. This web site is currently in use by Phase 4 apprentice plumbers and is delivered through WebCT. The CD accompanying this thesis contains a short …

Using Sketches And Knowledge Bases For Geo-Spatial Image Retrieval, Michela Bertolotto, James Carswell, E Mcloughlin, D O'Sullivan, C Wilson

Articles

This paper presents research in the field of knowledge management for geo-spatial imagery including scanned aerial photos and satellite images. We have developed a web-based system that allows users to query a database of images not only using metadata, but also drawing sketches of configurations of objects they are interested in as well as inputting textual descriptions of their intended task. Our system integrates case-based reasoning techniques to form a knowledge base from previously issued queries that can be exploited to improve future query processing and to build organizational memory through experience capture. The effective design and implementation of a …

Musical Pattern Design Using Contour Icons, Charlie Cullen, Eugene Coyle

Conference papers

This paper considers the use of Contour Icons in the design and implementation of musical patterns, for the purposes of detection and recognition. Research work had endeavoured to deliver musical patterns that were both distinct and memorable, and to this end a set of basic melodic shapes were introduced using a Sonification application called TrioSon that had been designed for the purpose. Existing work in the field (such as that concerning Earcon design) has considered the mechanisms by which patterns may be made distinctive, but it is argued that separate consideration must be given to the method of making such …

Survival Of Antibiotic Resistant And Antibiotic Sensitive Strains Of E. Coli O157 And E. Coli O26 In Food Matrices., Ciara Walsh, Geraldine Duffy, I. S. Blair, D. A. Mcdowell

Articles

Escherichia coli O157:H7 or E. coli O26, which were AS (antibiotic sensitive), AR (laboratory created antibiotic resistant mutants), or naturally MAR (multi-antibiotic resistant), were inoculated into laboratory media, yoghurt or orange juice and their growth/survival monitored during enrichment at 37 °C or storage at 4 °C. The strains were also inoculated into minced beef and their thermal inactivation (D-values) examined at 55 °C, with and without a prior heat shock at 48 °C. The growth kinetics (lag phases, growth rates) of the VTEC (verocytotoxigenic E. coli), incubated over 24 h at 37 °C in laboratory media, were …

Legal Pluralism And Human Agency, Jeremy Webber

Osgoode Hall Law Journal

Much legal-pluralist scholarship tends to naturalize "the law of the context," treating that law as though it were inherent in social interaction, emerging spontaneously, without conscious human decision. This view overstates the role of agreement in human societies and mischaracterizes the nature of law, including non-state law. All law is concerned with establishing a collective set of norms against a backdrop of normative disagreement, not agreement. It necessarily contains mechanisms for bringing contention to a provisional close, imposing a collective solution. This article presents a theory of legal pluralism that takes human disagreement seriously. The theory retains four themes crucial …

A Survey Of Foreign-Educated Nurses: Workforce Experience, Melissa Giegerich

Honors Projects

The United States (US) is currently undergoing a nursing shortage. As a result, many health care agencies in the US and around the world are turning to nurses educated in other countries to fill vacant positions. Despite the increased utilization of foreign-educated nurses, there is a lack of understanding of how these nurses transition into the US workforce. This study describes foreign-educated nurses who work in Illinois and the factors that affected their transition into the US professional nursing workforce. By focusing on nurses who were educated abroad and work in Illinois, this study will help Illinois nurses and Illinois …

Requirements Gathering For Simulation, John Ryan, Cathal Heavey

Conference papers

This paper discusses the current shortfalls in support for the pre-coding phases of a discrete event simulation project. The paper then presents a process modelling technique, Simulation Activity Diagrams (SADs), developed to specifically support the initial requirements gathering phases of a simulation project. The paper concludes with an outline of proposed future developments to the modelling technique.

Irish Marketing Review, Vol. 18, No. 1 & 2, 2006, The Marketing Institute

Issues

The Irish Marketing Review deals with issues, developments, research and practise in marketing. This is a special issue on " the island view of relationship marketing and networks".

Indexing Change In Lis Work: Implications For Recruiting Managers, John Cullen, Allison Kavanagh

Articles

Purpose: This paper reports on three periods of library and information service (LIS) recruitment data collected over a six-year timeframe with the aim of developing a tool for indexing change in the recruitment and labour market for workers in the field. Methodology / Approach: The recruitment data was collected in an Irish context over three distinct 12-month timeframes (1999, 2001-2002 and 2005). The two earlier annual sets of data have already been reported and discussed (the latter in Library Management in 2004a), and the most recent set (2005) is presented here. The data over the three timeframes is compared here, …

Effect Of Step Sintering On Breakdown Voltage Of Varistors Prepared From Nanomaterials, Suresh Pillai, Declan Mccormack, John Kelly, Ramesh Raghavendra

Articles

No abstract provided.

A Study Of The Relationship Between The Number Of High School Science Credits Earned And Successful Completion Of The First Year Of College At A Regents’ Institution, Amy Denise Jabens

Dissertations and Theses @ UNI

The purpose of this research was to study the relationship between the number of science credits a student completes at Prairie High School and the successful completion of his or her first year of college at an Iowa Regent's institution as defined by college grade point average and a minimum number of credits earned. Data for this study was collected from high school transcripts and Prairie High School's annual report from the Iowa State Board of Regents. This report outlines how many credits students earn and their cumulative grade point average at the end of their first year of college. …

Neural Network Control Of Spark Ignition Engines With High Egr Levels, A. Singh, Brian C. Kaul, J. A. Drallmeier, Jagannathan Sarangapani, Jonathan B. Vance

Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

Research has shown substantial reductions in the oxides of nitrogen (NOx) concentrations by using 10% to 25% exhaust gas recirculation (EGR) in spark ignition (SI) engines [1]. However under high EGR levels the engine exhibits strong cyclic dispersion in heat release which may lead to instability and unsatisfactory performance. A suite of neural network (NN)-based output feedback controllers with and without reinforcement learning is developed to control the SI engine at high levels of EGR even when the engine dynamics are unknown by using fuel as the control input. A separate control loop was designed for controlling EGR levels. The …

A Hierarchical Secure Routing Protocol Against Black Hole Attacks In Sensor Networks, Jian Yin, Sanjay Kumar Madria

Computer Science Faculty Research & Creative Works

A black hole attack is a severe attack that can be easily employed against routing in sensor networks. In a black hole attack, a malicious node spuriously announces a short route to the sink node (the destination) to attract additional traffic to the malicious node and then drops them. In this paper, we propose a hierarchical secure routing protocol for detecting and defending against black hole attacks. The proposed protocol uses only symmetric key cryptography to discover a safe route against black hole attacks. The comparison of the proposed protocol with two other existing approaches proves that the proposed scheme …

An Internet Based Intelligent Argumentation System For Collaborative Engineering Design, Xiaoqing Frank Liu, Samir Raorane, Man Zheng, Ming-Chuan Leu

Computer Science Faculty Research & Creative Works

Modern product design is a very complicated process which involves groups of designers, manufacturers, suppliers, and customer representatives. Conflicts are unavoidable in collaboration among multiple stakeholders, who have different objectives, requirements, and priorities. Unfortunately, current web-based collaborative engineering design systems do not support collaborative conflict resolution. In this paper, we will develop an intelligent computational argumentation model to enable management of a large scale argumentation network, and resolution of conflicts based on argumentation from many participants. A web-based intelligent argumentation tool is developed as a part of a web-based collaborative engineering design system based on the above model to resolve …

Cadre: A Collaborative Replica Allocation And Deallocation Approach For Mobile-P2p Networks, Anirban Mondal, Sanjay Kumar Madria, Masaru Kitsuregawa

Computer Science Faculty Research & Creative Works

This paper proposes CADRE (Collaborative Allocation and Deallocation of Replicas with Efficiency), a dynamic replication scheme for improving the typically low data availability in mobile ad-hoc peer-to-peer (M-P2P) networks. The main contributions of CADRE are two-fold. First, it collaboratively performs both replica allocation and deallocation in tandem to facilitate optimal replication and to avoid 'thrashing' conditions. Second, it addresses fair replica allocation across the MHs. CADRE deploys a hybrid super-peer architecture in which some of the MHs act as the 'gateway nodes' (GNs) in a given region. GNs facilitate both search and replication. Our performance study indicates that CADRE indeed …

Energy And Communication Efficient Group Key Management Protocol For Hierarchical Sensor Networks, Biswajit Panja, Sanjay Kumar Madria, Bharat Bhargava

Computer Science Faculty Research & Creative Works

In this paper, we describe group key management protocosl for hierarchical sensor networks where instead of using pre-deployed keys, each sensor node generates a partial key dynamically using a function. The function takes partial keys of its children as input. The design of the protocol is motivated by the fact that traditional cryptographic techniques are impractical in sensor networks because of high energy and computational overheads. The group key management protocol supports the establishment of two types of group keys; one for the sensor nodes within a group, and the other in a group of cluster heads. The protocol handles …

Improving Channel Throughput Of Wlans And Ad Hoc Networks Using Explicit Denial Of Requests, Maggie Xiaoyan Cheng, Yadi Ma, Yi Wang

Computer Science Faculty Research & Creative Works

A new Multiple Access Control scheme for wireless ad hoc networks and WLANs is proposed. This scheme uses explicit denial of channel requests and a busy tone to improve channel throughput. Performance analysis shows significant improvement when the network is under heavy traffic load.

Secrout: A Secure Routing Protocol For Sensor Networks, Jian Yin, Sanjay Kumar Madria

Computer Science Faculty Research & Creative Works

In this paper, we present a secure routing protocol for sensor networks (SecRout) to safeguard sensor networks under different types of attacks. The SecRout protocol uses the symmetric cryptography to secure messages, and uses a small cache in sensor nodes to record the partial routing path (previous and next nodes) to the destination. It guarantees that the destination will be able to identify and discard the tampered messages and ensure that the messages received are not tampered. Comparing the performance with non-secure routing protocol AODV (ad hoc on demand distance vector routing), the SecRout protocol only has a small byte …

Adaptive Distributed Fair Scheduling And Its Implementation In Wireless Sensor Networks, Maciej Jan Zawodniok, Jagannathan Sarangapani, Steve Eugene Watkins, James W. Fonda

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

A novel adaptive and distributed fair scheduling (ADFS) scheme for wireless sensor networks is shown through hardware implementation. In contrast to simulation, hardware evaluation provides valuable feedback to protocol and hardware development process. The proposed protocol focuses on quality-of-service (QoS) issues to address flow prioritization. Thus, when nodes access a shared channel, the proposed ADFS allocates the channel bandwidth proportionally to the weight, or priority, of the packet flows. Moreover, ADFS allows for dynamic allocation of network resources with little added overhead. Weights are initially assigned using user specified QoS criteria. These weights are subsequently updated as a function of …

Asia Pacific Perspectives Vol. 6 No. 1, May 2006, University Of San Francisco, University Of San Francisco

Asia Pacific Perspectives

Contents:

Philippine Studies and the Centennial of the Diaspora: An Introduction by Joaquin L. Gonzalez III, and Evelyn I. Rodriguez

Primerang Bituin: Philippines-Mexico Relations at the Dawn of the Pacific Rim Century by Evelyn I. Rodriguez

Since the end of WWII, the region of countries bordering, and various island nations within, the Pacific Ocean, has drawn much attention, and been subject to a variety of institutional arrangements intended to promote certain political, economic, and environmental interests. Because of this, the mid-twentieth century is widely held as the starting point for Pacific Rim relations, and studies of Pan-Pacific interactions almost strictly …

Studies In Slang, Vii, Barry A. Popik, Gerald Leonard Cohen

Arts, Languages and Philosophy Faculty Research & Creative Works

No abstract provided.

Use Of A Classroom Response System To Enhance Classroom Interactivity, Keng Siau, Hong Sheng, Fiona Fui-Hoon Nah

Business and Information Technology Faculty Research & Creative Works

Classroom interactivity is a critical component of teaching and learning. This paper reports on the use of a classroom response system to enhance classroom interactivity in a systems analysis and design course. The success of the project was assessed using both quantitative and qualitative data. A pretest/posttest design was used to examine the effects of a classroom response system on interactivity. The results show that a classroom response system can significantly improve classroom interactivity. Qualitative data was also collected to identify the strengths and weaknesses of using a classroom response system to enhance classroom interaction. Based on the quantitative and …

Air Passenger Rights:A New Departure In European Aviation Law, Niall Neligan

Articles

The purpose of this article is to critically evaluate the legal and economic implications of the framework for passenger rights under Regulation 261/2004 in light of the recent decision of the Court of Justice in International Air Transport Association v The Department of Transport . This article will examine in detail the Regulation,
outlining the major provisions contained within, the legal challenge brought by the International Air Transport Association (“IATA”) and the European Low Fares Association (“ELFA”) and the impact
it will have on passenger rights in the European Union. Furthermore, the article will conclude by examining how national enforcement …

Cbc.Ca - Broadcast Sovereignity In A Digital Environment, Brian O'Neill

Articles

Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), like many public broadcasters, has identified the value of branding their services on the world wide web as a crucial element in the strategy to bring radio into the digital era. Their approach highlights a number of strategically important issues facing broadcasters in the current environment. The internet, in Canadian terms, is an unregulated space and a not particularly Canadian space. Just as in the terrestrial environment, broadcasters like CBC have to operate in an environment dominated by United States-based interests. The regulatory solutions that Canada has previously pursued in order to preserve cultural sovereignty may …

Our Views: Anybody Listening?: Researching The Views And Needs Of Young People In Co. Kildare, Kevin Lalor, Katie Baird

Reports

No abstract provided.