Digital Commons Network^™

Expressions As Data In Relational Data Base Management Systems, Mahesh Saravanan

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

Numerous applications, such as publish/subscribe, website personalization, applications involving continuous queries, etc., require that user.s interest be persistently maintained and matched with the expected data. Conditional Expressions can be used to maintain user interests. This thesis focuses on the support for expression data type in relational database system, allowing storing of conditional expressions as .data. in columns of database tables and evaluating those expressions using an EVALUATE operator. With this context, expressions can be interpreted as descriptions, queries, and filters, and this significantly broadens the use of a relational database system to support new types of applications. The thesis presents …

Clustering Of Leukemia Patients Via Gene Expression Data Analysis, Zhiyu Zhao

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

This thesis attempts to cluster some leukemia patients described by gene expression data, and discover the most discriminating a few genes that are responsible for the clustering. A combined approach of Principal Direction Divisive Partitioning and bisect K-means algorithms is applied to the clustering of the selected leukemia dataset, and both unsupervised and supervised methods are considered in order to get the optimal results. As shown by the experimental results and the predefined reference, the combination of PDDP and bisect K-means successfully clusters the leukemia patients, and efficiently discovers some significant genes that can serve as the discriminator of the …

White Faculty At Historically Black Colleges And Universities, Kimya Dawson-Smith

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this study was to explore the socialization process of White faculty at Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs). Specifically, this qualitative study identified influences and barriers in the socialization process of White tenure-line faculty at two HBCUs. Through the participants shared experiences, both positive and negative themes emerged relative to their perceptions of the socialization process. The positive themes were: the provision of clear institutional values and expectations through colleagues and institutional documentation, as well as establishing and maintaining collegial relationships, particularly with senior faculty members. On the other hand, the participants identified the absence of an …

Protecting Mobile Ad Hoc Networks From Spurious Cts Attacks 'Carrier Sensing Based Deferral Mechanism', Sreekanth Pagadala

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

The Request-To-Send (RTS)/Clear-To-Send (CTS) mechanism is used to combat Hidden/Exposed node problems in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks (MANETs). The popular implementation of the RTS/CTS mechanism may lead to virtual blocking of the wireless medium. Problem arises if a malicious node randomly sends out a large number of spurious CTS frames in order to falsely block regular nodes in its neighborhood. Such an attack is termed as spurious CTS attack. In this thesis, we investigate the effects of such spurious CTS attacks and propose a solution to mitigate the problem. Our proposed solution, Carrier Sensing based Deferral (CSD) mechanism, asks nodes …

Detecting Routing Misbehavior In Mobile Ad Hoc Network, Kejun Liu

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

Routing misbehavior in MANETs (Mobile Ad Hoc Networks) is studied in this thesis. In general, routing protocols for MANETs are designed based on the assumption that all par- ticipating nodes are fully cooperative. However, due to the open structure and scarcely available battery-based energy, node misbehaviors may exist. One such routing misbehavior is that some selfish nodes will participate in the route discovery and maintenance processes but refuse to forward data packets. Therefore, we propose the 2ACK scheme that serves as an add-on technique for routing schemes to detect routing misbehavior and to mitigate their adverse effect. The main idea …

Hate Date, Mike Gemme

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

This is a story about a man who revenge dates women for hire because he thinks women are only out to hurt men. Bryce has something of an allergic reaction anytime he tries to talk to a woman unless it is under a completely false pretense, in which case he is a woman's worst nightmare: A charming, handsome, heartbreaker. His world gets turned upside down when Bryce, despite his affliction, falls in love with a woman and must undergo painful subterfuge techniques just to be around her. Can a relationship built on pain, survive? Will Bryce give up what he …

Swan-Diving At The Milan Lounge, Jana Mackin

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

No abstract provided.

Digital Dissection Of Radiographs, Using The Early Cretaceous Bird Confuciusornis And Photoshop Cs2tm, Sirelious White

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

In the past, radiographs (x-ray "shadowgraphs") have been used by paleontologists as ways to identify and capture bone images. Primarily, this was done to examine the skeletal elements without having to remove the surrounding matrix. Radiographs have so much three-dimensional information compressed onto a two-dimension image that it is often impossible to understand the entire skeleton. Obviously, it would be desirable to strip away the readily interpretable skeleton elements and examine those less well understood. An initial set of experiments were performed on a particular section of a radiograph of Confuciusornis sanctus, as a subject, while utilizing Photoshop CS2TM to …

An Empirical Analysis Of Commercial Bank Profitability In Financially Liberalized Markets, James Nguyen

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

Chapter 1 of the dissertation investigates the determinants of bank interest margin (NIM) and noninterest income (NII) using a system estimation approach for all commercial banks in a group of 28 financially liberalized countries during the period between 1997 and 2004. The empirical results generally suggest that NIM is directly influenced by operating costs, risk aversion, credit risk, the interaction between interest rate risk and bank risk, bank size, volume of credit, and NII. NIM is negatively related to interest rate risk and capital adequacy. NII is found to correlate positively with NIM, total assets, credit risk, liquidity risk, overhead …

Development Of An Image Noise Estimation Method And A Sub-Imaging Based Wiener Method, Eric F. Smith

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

This research consists of three parts. The first part is an investigation of several popular image restoration techniques. The techniques are used to restore 2-D image data, f(x, y), that has been blurred by a known point spread function (PSF), b(x, y) and corrupted by an unknown amount of noise, n(x, y). Several sample images are restored using all of the techniques. Of the methods investigated the one which produces the best restoration results was determined to be the Wiener deconvolution method. The determination of the best method is based on the quality of the restored image and the required …

Government Ownership, Firm Value And Choice Of Seo Methods--- Evidence From Privatized Chinese Soes, Ohannes Paskelian

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

In 1991, the Chinese government started the privatization process. A distinguishing feature of this privatization process is the presence of the government as a major shareholder in the privatized SOEs which creates a unique ownership structure that affects the firm performance, and, in turns its choice of equity issuing method. This dissertation investigates the relation between ownership structure, firm value, and the choice of equity offering method of the Chinese semi-privatized former state-owned enterprises. The dissertation consists of two essays. The first essay examines this relationship during the period 1993-1998 when the Chinese stock exchanges were at the infancy stage. …

The Garden Of Earthly Delights, Vol Ranger

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

The Garden of Earthly Delights is a historical novel set in late 15th century Spain.

A Study Of Conditional Volatilities In Financial Markets Using Generalized Conditional Heteroscedasticity Jump Models, Babatunde Olatunji Odusami

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

In this manuscript, I investigate the time-varying volatilities and co-volatilities in the fixed income and equities market using jump augmented stochastic volatility models. The results highlights that the fact that jumps are inherent in financial markets and have implications for the dynamics of volatilities and co-volatilities of financial assets over time. Jump augmented models provide a superior description of instantaneous market conditions and a promising avenue for future research in areas of asset pricing, portfolio selection, and risk management.

Bloom Filters For Filesystem Forensics, Rachel Bourg

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

Digital forensics investigations become more time consuming as the amount of data to be investigated grows. Secular growth trends between hard drive and memory capacity just exacerbate the problem. Bloom filters are space-efficient, probabilistic data structures that can represent data sets with quantifiable false positive rates that have the potential to alleviate the problem by reducing space requirements. We provide a framework using Bloom filters to allow fine-grained content identification to detect similarity, instead of equality. We also provide a method to compare filters directly and a statistical means of interpreting the results. We developed a tool--md5bloom--that uses Bloom filters …

A Case Study Of Inter-Arrival Time Distributions Of Container Ships, Tu-Cheng Kuo, Wen-Chih Huang, Sheng-Chieh Wu, Pei-Lun Cheng

Journal of Marine Science and Technology–Taiwan

Given the recent prevalence of periodical container liners, the applicability of related models of widely applied queuing theory is left in doubt. Since they focus on marine liners, the distribution pattern is always considered to be a deterministic distribution for periodical schedule. In order to investigate the distribution patterns of container liners, observation units are segmented into single shipping liners, single berths, single container terminals and entire ports. The evolution of the ship arrival distribution pattern and the goodness-of-fit test for observation are based on the ship dynamic data of international harbors in Taiwan. This study aims to implement tests …

Web Services Of Mms Applications On Mobile Devices, Cheng-Chih Yang, Cheng-Min Lin

Journal of Marine Science and Technology–Taiwan

This study develops the Web services that are applied in Multimedia Message Service (MMS) applications via the Internet and operated by mobile portable devices, such as Personal Digital Assistant (PDA) and cellular phone. First, a MMS system environment and architecture is modeled. Next, the operations and interface of the MMS system is defined by the Web Services Description Language (WSDL) to represent the web services on MMS application system. Finally, two system prototypes are described in this study that includes distance video cam monitor system and GPRS cellular phone MMS sender.

Particle Swarm Optimization For Global Optimization Problems, Hsin-Chuan Kuo, Jiang-Ren Chang, Ching-Hsiang Liu

Journal of Marine Science and Technology–Taiwan

In this paper, the particle swarm optimization (PSO), originated as a simulation of a simplified social system with swarm intelligence and having exploring and exploiting characteristics of the particle swarm, is adopted to deal with the global optimization problems. To begin with, four non-linear two-dimensional functions are adopted as benchmark examples for determining the suitable ranges of parameters in the PSO. It is found that uses of the PSO can make the search quickly converge to the global optimum. Then, several benchmark functions below ten-dimensions are adopted especially for comparisons of search efficiency on the PSO and other algorithms. Results …

Comparison Between Arpa Radar And Ais Characteristics For Vessel Traffic Services, Bin Lin, Chih-Hao Huang

Journal of Marine Science and Technology–Taiwan

Recently most maritime countries in the world have fitted automatic identification system (AIS) in vessel traffic services (VTS) in compliance with regulations of International Convention in order to identify ship name and collect ship information. Traditionally VTS operators use automatic radar plotting aids (ARPA) to get ship maneuvering information for preventing ships from navigational faults. Although the two equipments can provide similar functions for VTS, the operational theory of them is quite different. In this study an experimental observation was carried out by means of ARPA radar and AIS fitted in the building of Merchant Marine Department, NTOU. The detected …

Preliminary Screening Of Soil Actinomycetes For Anti-Tyrosinase Activity, Te-Sheng Chang, Min Tseng

Journal of Marine Science and Technology–Taiwan

A bacterial strain TI-B10 was isolated from forest soil in Taiwan. The strain showed 46 U/ml of anti-tyrosinase activity. On the basis of the typical colony appearance and 16S rRNA gene sequences analysis, the strain TI-B10 belonged to the genus Streptomyces. The antityrosinase activity of the strain could be improved to 73 U/ml under optimal cultural conditions at pH 8.0 and 30°C in the YMG medium.

The Relative Universality Of Human Rights (Revised), Jack Donnelly

Human Rights & Human Welfare

© Jack Donnelly. All rights reserved.

This article is forthcoming in Human Rights Quarterly.

This paper may be freely circulated in electronic or hard copy provided it is not modified in any way, the rights of the author not infringed, and the paper is not quoted or cited without express permission of the author. The editors cannot guarantee a stable URL for any paper posted here, nor will they be responsible for notifying others if the URL is changed or the paper is taken off the site. Electronic copies of this paper may not be posted on any other website …

Brief Of Amicus Curiae, The National Legislative Association On Prescription Drug Prices, The New Hampshire Medical Society, And Prescription Policy Choices In Support Of Defendant's Objection To Plaintiff's Motion For Preliminary Injunction, Sean Flynn

Amicus Briefs & Court Filings

Plaintiffs in this case seek a preliminary injunction to prevent the enforcement of the New Hampshire Prescription Confidentiality Act, which protects consumers and the privacy interests of doctors in the state of New Hampshire from the increasingly common practice of using doctor-identifying information in prescription records to facilitate targeting of pharmaceutical marketing and gifts toward doctors who prescribe the most expensive drugs for their patients. This practice raises drug costs for all New Hampshire residents and compromises the professional autonomy of doctors. This brief addresses the failure of the plaintiffs to show that they are likely to succeed on the …

Legitimacy As An Assessment Of Existing Legal Standards: The Case Of The 2003 Iraq War, Charlotte Ku

Faculty Scholarship

The Iraq war was a multiple assault on the foundations and rules of the existing UN-centered world order. It called into question the adequacy of the existing institutions for articulating global norms and enforcing compliance with the demands of the international community. It highlighted also the unwillingness of some key countries to wait until definitive proof before acting to meet the danger of the world's most destructive weapons falling into the hands of the world's most dangerous regimes. It was simultaneously a test of the UN's willingness and ability to deal with brutal dictatorships and a searching scrutiny of the …

Role Of The Cytoplasmic Domain In Anabaena Sensory Rhodopsin Photocycling: Vectoriality Of Schiff Base Deprotonation, Oleg A Sineshchekov, Elena N Spudich, Vishwa D Trivedi, John L Spudich

Faculty, Staff and Student Publications

Light-induced electric signals in intact E. coli cells generated by heterologously expressed full-length and C-terminally truncated versions of Anabaena sensory rhodopsin (ASR) demonstrate that the charge movements within the membrane-embedded part of the molecule are stringently controlled by the cytoplasmic domain. In particular, truncation inverts the direction of proton movement during Schiff base deprotonation from outward to cytoplasmic. Truncation also alters faster charge movements that occur before Schiff base deprotonation. Asp(217) as previously shown by FTIR serves as a proton acceptor in the truncated ASR but not in the full-length version, and its mutation to Asn restores the natural outward …

Ruby Lee Cooper

African American Funeral Programs

No abstract provided.

Optimal Tax Compliance And Penalties When The Law Is Uncertain, Kyle D. Logue

Law & Economics Working Papers Archive: 2003-2009

This Article examines the optimal level of tax compliance and the optimal penalty for noncompliance in circumstances in which the tax law is substantively uncertain – that is, when the precise application of the Internal Revenue Code to a particular situation is not clear. In such situations, two interesting questions arise: First, as a normative matter, how certain should a taxpayer be before she relies on a particular interpretation of a substantively uncertain tax rule? That is, if a particular position is not clearly prohibited, but neither is it clearly allowed, under the tax law, what is the appropriate threshold …

Of "Illustrators," "Narrators," "Editors," And "Readers": Describing Relations Between Significantly Disabled Students And Their Peers, Srikala Naraian

Dissertations

This paper interweaves several theoretical strands—disability studies, narrative theories, and sociocultural perspectives on learning—both as a means to understand current practice in the education of students with significant disabilities as well as to envisage other forms of participation for them. The aims of the study are derived from the argument made by Ferguson (2003) that the narratives of others in the lives of severely disabled individuals are critical to the formation of their identities. Appropriating this idea to the classroom, this study explores the notion that the narratives of classroom peers are vital to the participation of the severely disabled …

Restoring The Right Constitution?, Eduardo M. Peñalver

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

After years of relative neglect, the past few decades have witnessed a dramatic renewal of interest in the natural law tradition within philosophical circles. This natural law renaissance, however, has yet to bear much fruit within American constitutional discourse, especially among commentators on the left. In light of its low profile within contemporary constitutional debates, an effort to formulate a natural law constitutionalism is almost by definition an event worthy of sustained attention. In "Restoring the Lost Constitution," Randy Barnett draws heavily upon a natural law theory of constitutional legitimacy to argue in favor of a radically libertarian reading of …

The Definition And Jurisdiction Of The Crime Of Aggression And The International Criminal Court, Buhm-Suk Baek

Cornell Law School J.D. Student Research Papers

The United Nations Diplomatic Conference of Plenipotentiaries on the Establishment of an International Criminal Court that was held in Rome to establish the International Criminal Court in 1998 finally adopted the Rome Statute with the participation of 160 countries. The Rome Statute of the ICC entered into force on 1 July 2002 and has been ratified by 100 States. What was considered not so long ago merely a dream of a few people has become a reality after the strenuous efforts of the UN over 50 years. However, one central issue still remains unresolved in the Rome Status. It is …

Abolition Of Programs Legislation On Suspension Of Academic Programs. 30-Day Extension Of Time Requested By President Carothers., University Of Rhode Island Faculty Senate

Faculty Senate Bills

No abstract provided.

The Four Hundred Forty-Sixth Report Of The Curricular Affairs Committee., University Of Rhode Island Faculty Senate

Faculty Senate Bills

No abstract provided.