Digital Commons Network^™

Guardian Angel (Ireland), Thomas Cooney

Case studies

It was the summer of 2006 and three friends of many years had come up with a business idea that they believed could be a money-spinner for all of them. Maria Harrison, Krystle Malone and Marie Lyons had all been students at the Technological University Dublin and had recently completed their degree in Marketing. As part of their programme, they had taken a course on Entrepreneurship by way of interest rather than any deep-rooted desire to start their own business. But now, they are about to meet a venture capital company to ask for €300,000 to get the business started. …

Ecoserve (Ireland), Thomas Cooney

Case studies

Roisin Nash had just finished reading a new report that had recently been launched by the Minister for Communications, Marine and Natural Resources Noel Dempsey at the headquarters of the Marine Institute at Oranmore in County Galway. The report, entitled ‘Sea Change – A Marine Knowledge, Research and Innovation Strategy for Ireland 2007- 2013’, presented a national agenda (comprising of science, research, innovation, and management) aimed at a complete transformation of the Irish maritime economy. Roisin felt that the report provided a clear and realistic picture of future opportunities and challenges within the Irish marine industry, and that it would …

Echinades Fish Farm (Greece), Thomas Cooney

Case studies

The past decade had seen a dramatic decline in the regional economy along the west coast of the Greece as agriculture faded and few incentives existed for manufacturing companies to locate there given its relatively poor infrastructure. Since the long-established Greek strength of tourism was still focused on the islands and in areas where large natural beaches offered holidaymakers the opportunity to lay out in the glorious Mediterranean sunshine, this region of barren land and traditional lifestyle offered little to entice the modern tourist. Despite this pessimistic background, Nikos Anagnopoulos stood on the deck of the small boat that had …

Digicel Foundation (Haiti), Thomas Cooney

Case studies

It was a beautiful day on March 5th 2007 and the official launch of the Digicel Foundation Haiti was drawing to a close. The Foundation had been inaugurated at a special ceremony to mark the completion of the Foundation's first project, the rebuilding in record time of the Ecole Mixte Lageho (a primary school in the hurricane ravaged Pont Janvier rural community of Thomazeau), thanks primarily to the combined efforts of Digicel staff and local community members. Denis O'Brien (Digicel Group Founder / Chairman and Patron of the Digicel Foundation) was joined at the ceremony by the Prime Minister of …

Geolearn – Exploiting New Educational Tools In The Spatial Information Sciences, Audrey Martin, Kevin Mooney, Eugene Mcgovern

Conference Papers

GeoLearn is an educational research group within the Department of Spatial Information Sciences (DSIS) in the Technological University Dublin (DIT). Its aim is to promote, develop and evaluate emerging learning methods and resources, such as E-Learning and other innovative educational techniques in the Geomatics discipline.

The GeoLearn group has conducted a number of pilot studies of E-Learning for Continuing Professional Development (CPD) with International groups and the evaluation of the feedback from participants is presented. The group has also participated in the education service of the European spatial data research organisation (EuroSDR) delivering and evaluating its courses to multi-national participants. …

Student Non-Attendence In Higher Education: A Phenomenon Of Student Apathy Or Poor Pedagogy, Joanne Cleary-Holdforth

Level 3

Non-attendance at university seems to be an on-going problem that appears to transcend country, university and discipline. One need only consult the literature on this subject to appreciate the magnitude of this phenomenon (Gump 2006; McCarey et al. 2006; Sharma et al. 2005; Nicholl and Timmins 2005; Hughes 2005; Hunter and Tetley 1999; Longhurst 1999). It is a phenomenon that is both intriguing and frustrating and yet there is very little evidence of university or governmental policy on it. It is generally accepted that university is a rite of passage for its students and is, therefore, as much about a …

What Now?: Evaluating Elearning Cpd Practice In Irish Third-Level Education, Roisin Donnelly, K. C. O'Rourke

Journal Articles

The internet has made it impossible for higher education institutions to ignore technology in fulfilling their strategic mission and respond to the expectations of a diverse student body. In the Republic of Ireland, as elsewhere, the use of online technologies has become an increasingly important challenge in academic staff development, and on the surface, eLearning has been moderately successful in the teaching and learning environment. However, given the rapid rate of change in both technology and the increasing diversity in academic staff and students, to describe accurately the nature of eLearning for academic staff development is near impossible. There has …

Perceived Impact Of Peer Observation Of Teaching In Higher Education, Roisin Donnelly

Journal Articles

This paper explores participant perceptions of the impact of a Peer Observation of Teaching scheme offered as part of an accredited Postgraduate Certificate in Teaching for academic staff/faculty in higher education. The Postgraduate Certificate Program has been designed to support the continuing professional development of academic staff/faculty through integration of peer learning. Inherent in the design and delivery of the Peer Observation of Teaching scheme is the belief by all involved that learning about teaching in higher education, and heightening a sense of professionalism, stems from a continuous process of transforming and constructing personal meaning in a variety of related …

Investigating Staff Perceptions Of E-Learning Development And Support For Students With Disabilities In Higher Education, Roisin Donnelly

Journal Articles

This paper reports on a study concerned with exploring staff perceptions on improving the design and delivery of e-learning provision for students and staff with disabilities in a higher education institution in the Republic of Ireland. The study aims to clarify understanding on how aspects of e-learning affect some of the key stakeholders in an institution of higher education – a disability liaison team, a learning technology team and an academic development centre. Essentially this paper is an example of research for learners with disabilities by people without disabilities. The language used in this paper is consistent with the social …

Turning The Hearts Of Fathers To Their Children: Why Religious Involvement Can Make A Difference, Loren Marks, David C. Dollahite

Faculty Publications

Charles Dickens, the English author and keen observer of human affairs, wrote of revolution-era France: "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times." In many ways, Dickens' dichotomy regarding "the best of times" and "the worst of times" captures the state of contemporary American fatherhood. Many fathers are more highly involved with their children than the fathers of past generations. Conversely, many other fathers are disconnected from or uninvolved with their children. For many of the fathers who are highly involved in their children's lives, their religious faith is a motivational influence.

Proteinparser:A Community Based Tool For The Generation Of A Detailed Protein Consensus And Fasta Output, Barry Ryan, Ronan Barrett

Articles

Comparison of bioinformatic data is a common application in the life sciences and beyond. In this communication, a novel Java based software tool, ProteinParser, is outlined. This soft- ware tool calculates a detailed consensus, or most common, amino acid at a given position in an aligned protein set, whilst also generating a full consensus protein FASTA output. A second application of this software tool, computing a consensus amino acid given a toler- ance threshold, is also demonstrated. The phytase and the common bacterial �-lactamase proteins are analysed as ‘proof of concept’ examples. Consensus proteins, as generated by ProteinParser, are regularly …

Torsion-Free Groups And Modules With The Involution Property, Brendan Goldsmith, C. Meehan, S.L. Wallutis

Articles

An Abelian group or module is said to have the involution property if every endomorphism is the sum of two automorphisms, one of which is an involution. We investigate this property for completely decomposable torsion-free Abelian groups and modules over the ring of -adic integers.

The Irish Working Group On Information Literacy: A Cross-Sectoral Approach, Philip Russell, Terry O'Brien

Support services (Former ITT) - Articles

The Working Group on Information Literacy (WGIL) was established by the Library Association of Ireland (LAI) in January 2006 to recommend strategies for the development of information skills at both a theoretical and practical level in the Library and Information Services sector in Ireland.

From the outset, one of the key objectives established was that the work of the WGIL would be approached on a cross-sectoral basis.

Membership of the group comprises ten members from across the range of LIS (Library and Information Services) sectors in Ireland. These include academic, special, schools, public, health and university sectors, and also a …

The Ip Multimedia Subsystem (Ims) & The Mobile Internet: Opportunities For The Mobile Operatorthe Ip Multimedia Subsystem (Ims) & The Mobile Internet: Opportunities For The Mobile Operator, Amanda O'Farrell, Brendan Tierney

Conference papers

The IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) is a new mobile communications architecture, which enables many new and innovative services, and can extend the possibilities of mobile Internet application development. These mobile Internet applications and the IMS, are considered in terms of the impact that they can have on the critical success factors (CSFs) of mobile operators. The CSFs identified are particular to mobile operators that are competing in a highly saturated (in terms of mobile penetration) marketplace, and that are facing the threat of increasing competition.

Using Gis To Assess Ireland's Knowledge Economy And Its Readiness For Knowledge Based Activity, Niall Mcguinness

Dissertations

The attractiveness of emerging low wages economics to primary industries such as manufacturing and production is forcing many western economies to transition to knowledge economies. In the absence of many forms of primary industry lost to low wage economies, the European Union and its members are fast realising the importance of attracting knowledge based enterprise in order to maintain Europe’s economic climate. Ireland too has a stated aim to become a knowledge economy by the year 2010. This can be achieved by investing in higher education and attracting knowledge industry to the country. Ireland has made some progress to achieving …

Employee Engagement As A Mediator Of The Relationship Between Management Support And Job Performance And Turnover, Liliya Akbulatova

Dissertations and Theses @ UNI

"Employee Engagement", a new motivational construct, has become popular in recent years. Most of the definitions of engagement formulated in different time periods share the understanding of engagement as a three dimension construct consisting of vigor, dedication, and absorption. Motivation is an important determinant of employee performance. Through the study contained in this paper, I aim to find out whether employee engagement mediates a relationship between management support (as one of the specific antecedents of employee engagement) and employee performance and turnover, as specific consequences of employee engagement. It appears that there is a full mediation between an antecedent variable …

Jazz Pedagogy And The Guitar: Recital Recording, Tony Brown

Dissertations and Theses @ UNI

This recital abstract documents material learned and skills developed in pursuit of the Master of Music in Jazz Pedagogy degree. The author's recital presents a practical application of the concepts learned in the Jazz Pedagogy program in the hands of a guitarist. The program selections were chosen from nine significant jazz guitar recordings by seven of the most prolific modem jazz guitarists. Each selection presented in this abstract will be discussed from a historical, musical, pedagogical, and philosophical point of view.

A Cross-Cultural Community: An Evaluative Study Of The Global Health Corps Training Program At The University Of Northern Iowa, Kalani Kee Brown

Dissertations and Theses @ UNI

Despite the current increase in the globalization of companies and the increase in the number of international assignees there has been very little research showing the significance of cross-cultural training in reducing international assignee failure rates. The current study was completed to evaluate the effectiveness of the Global Health Corps (GHC) organization as a training program for improving cross-cultural adjustment. An analysis was conducted on data obtained from 108 GHC students for the purpose of understanding the influence of cross-cultural experience and its effect on the cross-cultural adjustment of a successful person in this environment. Results indicated that students immersed …

Noise-Robust Automatic Speech Recognition Using A Predictive Echo State Network, Mark D. Skowronski, John G. Harris

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

Artificial neural networks have been shown to perform well in automatic speech recognition (ASR) tasks, although their complexity and excessive computational costs have limited their use. Recently, a recurrent neural network with simplified training, the echo state network (ESN), was introduced by Jaeger and shown to outperform conventional methods in time series prediction experiments. We created the predictive ESN classifier by combining the ESN with a state machine framework. In small-vocabulary ASR experiments, we compared the noise-robust performance of the predictive ESN classifier with a hidden Markov model (HMM) as a function of model size and signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). The …

Florida Wireless Implantable Recording Electrodes (Fwire) For Brain Machine Interfaces, Rizwan Bashirullah, John G. Harris, Justin C. Sanchez, Toshikazu Nishida, Jose C. Principe

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

This paper reviews on-going efforts towards the development of the Florida Wireless Implantable Recording Electrodes (FWIRE). The FWIRE microsystem platform is a fully implantable flexible substrate microelectrode array that employs state-of-the-art integrate-and-fire (IF) signal representation and wireless interface circuitry for recording neural activity from behaving rodents. The modular nature of the implantable neural recording electrode allows future enhancements to be seamlessly added to improve functionality including but not limited to rechargeability through inductive coupling, custom microelectrode arrays, higher capacity batteries, and more advanced integrated circuit technologies. This paper concentrates on custom integrated circuits such as neural interfacing amplifiers, baseband signal …

Differential Double Capture Cross Sections In P+He Collisions, Michael Schulz, T. Vajnai, J. A. Brand

Physics Faculty Research & Creative Works

We have measured differential double capture cross sections for 15 to 150 keV p+He collisions. We also analyzed differential double to single capture ratios, where we find pronounced peak structures. An explanation of these structures probably requires a quantum-mechanical description of elastic scattering between the projectile and the target nucleus. Strong final-state correlations have a large effect on the magnitude of the double capture cross sections

Effects Of The Final-State Electron-Ion Interactions On The Fully Differential Cross Sections For Heavy-Particle-Impact Ionization Of Helium, Don H. Madison, Jerry Peacher, M. Foster, K. Bartschat, H. P. Saha, Allison L. Harris

Physics Faculty Research & Creative Works

Three-dimensional fully differential cross sections for heavy-particle-impact ionization of helium are examined. Previously, the three-body distorted-wave (3DW) model has achieved good agreement with experiment in the scattering plane for small momentum transfers, but poor agreement for large momentum transfers. Poor agreement was also observed outside the scattering plane for all momentum transfers. In particular, the 3DW calculations predicted cross sections that were too small both perpendicular to the scattering plane and for large momentum transfers. The important unanswered question concerns the physical effects that cause the significant disagreement between experiment and theory. In previous works, the role of the projectile-ion …

Breaking The Cycle-Preventing Failures By Leveraging Historical Data During Conceptual Design, Daniel A. Krus, Katie Grantham

Engineering Management and Systems Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

Major engineering accidents are often caused by seemingly minor failures propagating through complex systems. One example of this is an accident involving a Bell 206 Rotorcraft where a fuel pump failure led to the severing of the tail boom. Cataloguing and communicating the knowledge of potential failures and failure propagations is critical to prevent further accidents. The need for effective failure prevention tools is not specific to rotorcrafts, however. Failure reporting systems have been adopted by various industries to aid and promote failure prevention. The catalogued failures usually consist of narratives describing which part of a product failed, how it …

Rfid Instrumentation In A Field Application, Theresa M. Swift, Martha J. Molander, Steve Eugene Watkins

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

The behavior of radio-frequency identification (RFID) tags is investigated in a field application. The RFID instrumentation is used to mark the position of point strain sensors in a fiber-reinforced polymer (FRP), short-span bridge. The tags are surface mounted on carbon FRP structural elements and covered with a resin wear layer, i.e. the deck of the bridge. The smart composite bridge was installed in 2000 and serves as a field testbed for various sensor technologies including the RFID tags. The operation of the RFID network is tested in the field and compared to laboratory tags. Specific research issues include long-term survivability …

Spatial Diversity In Signal Strength Based Wlan Location Determination Systems, Anil Ramachandran, Jagannathan Sarangapani

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

Literature indicates that spatial diversity can be utilized to compensate channel uncertainties such as multipath fading. Therefore, in this paper, spatial diversity is exploited for locating stationary and mobile objects in the indoor environment. First, space diversity technique is introduced for small scale motion and temporal variation compensation of received signal strength and it is demonstrated analytically that it enhances location accuracy. Small scale motion refers to movements of the transmitter and/or the receiver of the order of sub-wavelengths while temporal effects refer to environmental variations with time. A novel metric is introduced for selection combining in order to improve …

Wave Propagation On Power Cables With Special Regard To Metallic Screen Design, R. Papazyan, Per Pettersson, David Pommerenke

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

The high frequency properties of coaxial power cables are modeled using time- and frequency-domain numerical simulations. This is required due to the complex helical structure of the outer metallic screen. The finite element (FEM) and finite difference time domain methods (FDTD) have been employed to study the effect of screen spiralization. It is established that this screen design causes a dependence of the cable high frequency characteristics on the surrounding medium. Analytical model based on modal analysis of wave propagation in coaxial cables confirms the numerical observations.

Asymptotic Stability Of Nonholonomic Mobile Robot Formations Using Multilayer Neural Networks, Jagannathan Sarangapani, Travis Alan Dierks

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

In this paper, a combined kinematic/torque control law is developed for leader-follower based formation control using backstepping in order to accommodate the dynamics of the robots and the formation in contrast with kinematic-based formation controllers that are widely reported in the literature. A multilayer neural network (NN) is introduced along with robust integral of the sign of the error (RISE) feedback to approximate the dynamics of the follower as well as its leader using online weight tuning. It is shown using Lyapunov theory that the errors for the entire formation are asymptotically stable and the NN weights are bounded as …

A Normalized Fractionally Lower-Order Moment Algorithm For Space-Time Adaptive Processing, Y. Rosa Zheng, Genshe Chen, Erik Blasch

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

A new space-time adaptive processing algorithm is proposed for clutter suppression in phased array radar systems. In contrast to the commonly used normalized least mean square (NLMS) algorithm which uses the second order moments of the data for adaptation, the proposed method uses the lower order moments of the data to adapt the weight coefficients. The normalization is also performed based on the data sample dispersion rather than the variance. Processing results using simulated and measured data show that the proposed algorithm converges faster than the NLMS algorithms in Gaussian and non-Gaussian clutter environments. It also provides better clutter suppression …

Channel Estimation And Phase-Correction For Robust Underwater Acoustic Communications, Y. Rosa Zheng

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

This paper presents a new channel estimation, equalization, and phase correction scheme to combat the convergence and stability problem encountered by time-domain adaptive equalizers in underwater acoustic communication systems. Large Doppler spread and symbol scaling in underwater channels have been challenging problems causing significant phase drift and performance degradation. Our new method targets this problem by first allowing phase errors in the estimation of the fading channel coefficients and then perform group-wise (rather than symbol-wise) phase estimation and correction after equalization and multiple channel combining. Single transmitter and multiple receiver data obtained through ocean experiments have been processed using the …

Asia Pacific Perspectives Vol. 7 No. 1, July 2007, University Of San Francisco, University Of San Francisco

Asia Pacific Perspectives

Contents:

Editor's Introduction by Joaquin L. Gonzalez III

Cross-Regional Trade Cooperation: The Mexico-Japan Free Trade Agreement by Sarita D. Jackson

Latin American and Asia-Pacific countries are fervently forging economic cooperative relationships, which began with the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation in 1989. The two regions have shifted away from looking intra-regionally for economic stability against the forces of globalization. Rather, they have moved towards emphasizing cross-regional trade pacts. Cross-regional trade pacts present a number of advantages for member countries. The Mexico-Japan FTA, as a case study, shows us that trade and FDI between member countries increase with cross-regional free trade agreements (FTA). …