Digital Commons Network^™

Devil In A White Coat: The Temptation Of Forensic Evidence In The Age Of Csi, J. Herbie Difonzo, Ruth C. Stern

Hofstra Law Faculty Scholarship

On October 13, 2006, a couple and their two small children were found shot to death on a desolate stretch of Florida highway. Police found tracks along the roadway belonging to a van or sport utility vehicle. Concluding that the killer and the victims may have been traveling together, police also noted that the victims may have been lying down or kneeling when shot. The mother's defensive posture indicated that she had tried to shield the children from the bullets with her body. No footprints were found in the vicinity and the only physical evidence on the scene consisted of …

Domestic Violence As A Crime Of Pattern And Intent: An Alternative Reconceptualization, Alafair Burke

Hofstra Law Faculty Scholarship

Social scientists almost universally describe domestic violence as an ongoing pattern of conduct motivated by the batterer's desire for power and control over the victim. The criminal statutes used to prosecute domestic violence, however, almost universally describe discrete acts of conduct, without reference to the actor's motivation or other acts of conduct. Although some scholars have questioned the fit between domestic violence and the criminal statutes used to prosecute it, previously only Professor Deborah Tuerkheimer has called for a reconceptualization of the crime of domestic violence to fill the gap. This Article seeks to build on Professor Tuerkheimer's work by …

Portable Emission Measurements Of Snowcoaches And Snowmobiles In Yellowstone National Park, Gary A. Bishop, Ryan Stadtmuller, Donald H. Stedman

Fuel Efficiency Automobile Test Publications

No abstract provided.

A Divided America? Examining The Polarization Of The Electorate From 1974 To 2004, Liz Chandler '07

Res Publica - Journal of Undergraduate Research

To what extent are Americans divided in terms of their liberal and conservative preferences? Have their opinions become more polarized over time? Much of the recent literature on voter polarization suggests that there are far fewer moderate voters in the United States today compared to in the recent past, and that the country is in the midst of a massive “culture war” between liberals and conservatives. By examining public opinion polls taken from the 1970s until today, this analysis finds that in contrast to the suggestions that these authors make in regards to voter polarization, American voters have not steadily …

Practical Problems And Decision Making: The Effect Of Strategy And Experience, Sarah Flores '07

Honors Projects

What is the most effective way to make a decision? To examine the impact of strategy at varying levels of experience, 270 undergraduates solved problems in college life. Participants at three Levels of Experience (First Years, Sophomores, and Residential Life Staff) were assigned to one of four Strategy Conditions (Analysis, Holistic Intuition, Time Limit and Control). Results showed a marginal main effect of Level of Experience, a main effect of Strategy Condition, and an interaction of the two. Time Limit was detrimental for all conditions, except for Staff. First Years performed better with Intuition than Analysis, and Staff scored nonsignificantly …

Reducing Hiv Stigma: A Common Group Identity Perspective, Heather Deutsch '07

Honors Projects

The HIV/AIDS epidemic affects many individuals worldwide. Coupled with this epidemic is stigma levied against infected individuals. HIV stigma involves feelings of repulsion, discomfort, blaming, and sanctions. I attempted to combat HIV stigma by targeting emotional, motivational, and behavioral underpinnings in an intervention video. In this video, I manipulated: 1) whether the intervention speaker shared a group membership (IWU affiliation) with the audience and 2) the speaker's HIV status. I hypothesized that, when the speaker was affiliated with IWU and was HIV-positive, stigma would be reduced. Seventy-one lWU students watched the intervention video, and then I assessed participants' HIV-related implicit …

Social Ostracism And The Effect On Electroencephalogram Waves, Genevieve Nehrt '07

Honors Projects

Twenty one female Illinois Wesleyan students participated in an experiment examining changes in brain activity following social ostracism in a chat-room environment. More specifically theta EEG activity was recorded from three frontal areas (the Fz, F3, and F4 sites) and theta power and frequency were compared during three phases: inclusion, exclusion, and re-inclusion. The social ostracism paradigm was successful in creating a feeling of exclusion in participants. Participants had a lower level of interest, participation, and enjoyment during the exclusion phase than the inclusion and re-inclusion phases. Participants also typed fewer lines during the exclusion phase than in the other …

Counterfactual Thinking And The False Belief Task: A Developmental Study, Frederique Arreckx

School of Psychology Theses

The main aim of this thesis was to investigate children's reasoning abilities, especially their ability to solve counterfactual tasks. This thesis studied counterfactual thinking as an independent ability but also in relation to both types of the false belief tasks that measure theory of mind and contrary-to-fact syllogisms. Four experiments were conducted with typically developing children between the ages of 3 to 5. The first experiment studied the difference between affirmative and negative counterfactual questions and found that the former was easier than the latter. The second experiment replicated these results and investigated the link between counterfactual thinking and the …

Dynamics And Divergences In Electromagnetic Backgrounds, Paul Jameson

School of Engineering, Computing and Mathematics Theses

This thesis investigates the behaviour of a charge which is subjected to either an electromagnetic background created by a laser or a background which is hidden behind the resolution limitations of accelerator experiments. When a charge interacts with an intense laser beam its dynamics changes. The resulting trajectory of a non-relativistic particle is solved in this thesis without having to employ the dipole approximation. Many fundamental features of this trajectory are analysed including the drift velocity and the appearance of higher harmonic oscillations. In contrast, the interaction between a charge and an unobserved electromagnetic background leads to the infrared catastrophe. …

Colour, Copies And Confinement, A Ilderton, M Lavelle, D Mcmullan

School of Engineering, Computing and Mathematics

No abstract provided.

The Compact, Issue 14, May, 2007., Dit: Students' Union

DIT Student Union

No abstract provided.

Brain Integrity And Cerebral Atrophy In Vietnam Combat Veterans With And Without Posttraumatic Stress Disorder, Bruce L. Brown, Dawson W. Hedges, G. William Thatcher, Pamela J. Bennett, Shabnam Sood, David Paulson, Sarah Creem-Regehr, Steven Allen, Jamie Johnson, Brooke Froelich, Erin D. Bigler

Faculty Publications

Posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is associated with decreased hippocampal volume, but the relationship between trauma and brain morphology in the absence of PTSD is less clear. In this study, measures of brain integrity were determined by estimating gray and white matter regional brain volumes using structural magnetic resonance imaging in six patients with PTSD and in five controls with comparable trauma exposure but without clinical evidence of PTSD. The only statistically significant volume difference between groups was observed multivariately in the white matter of the right temporal lobe (superior temporal gyrus, fusiform gyrus, parahippocampal gyrus, white-matter stem, middle temporal gyrus, …

Thermal Control Of An Occupied Room: Investigating The Use Of Carbon Dioxide Concentration As An Auxiliary Control Variable, Kevin O'Connell, Aidan O'Dwyer

Conference papers

This paper details the theoretical and experimental work done in the examination of the relationship between human generated carbon dioxide concentration and temperature rise in an occupied room. Generation of carbon dioxide by humans is linked to metabolic rate and heat generation. Therefore, carbon dioxide concentration may be used as an indicator of occupancy in a room. Typically, a heating control system will react slowly to changes in room occupancy if temperature is used as the process variable. The aim of the work was to establish if carbon dioxide concentration in the space could be used as an auxiliary control …

Using Controller Tuning Formulae To Improve Performance, Aidan O'Dwyer

Conference papers

The proportional integral derivative (PID) controller is the most dominant form of automatic controller in industrial use today. With this device, it is necessary to adjust the controller parameters according to the nature of the process. Thus, for effective control of a HVDC system, for example, specific values need to be chosen for the P, I and D parameters, which will be different for the values required to control, for example, an induction motor drive. This tailoring of controller to process is known as controller tuning. Controller tuning is easily and effectively performed using tuning rules (i.e. formulae for controller …

Academic Change In Higher Education In Europe, Kevin Kelly, Mike Murphy

Conference papers

This paper analyses academic change in higher education internationally but mainly in Europe. It examines one College in Ireland as it faces major change and examines whether best practice change that has been successful elsewhere might be appropriate in this particular setting, with it’s own culture and history. Research is ongoing, using qualitative inquiry and fourth generation evaluation which seeks to address the concerns and issues of stakeholders. It is an illuminative evaluation project that seeks to allow senior management in the College see what is happening elsewhere and evaluate whether such methods might be appropriate in their own college. …

Engineering Science As Opposed To Natural And Applied Science, Eugene Coyle, Mike Murphy, William Grimson

Books/Book chapters

In exploring the epistemology of engineering science we propose a model of engineering. This model incorporates the goals of engineering, the approach to engineering (also called the engineering method) and the role of experience in engi-neering. The basis for understanding the nature of engineering science will be ex-plored, and will be contrasted with natural science. To begin, a large-scale engi-neering project that was successfully completed in Ireland many years ago is dis-cussed - specifically, the development of a megalithic passage tomb as an exemplar of the engineering method in structural design, project management and aesthetics. This exemplar firmly demonstrates that …

Benefits And Challenges Of Using Live Modeling To Help Preservice Teachers Transfer Technology Integration Principles, Richard E. West, Charles R. Graham

Faculty Publications

One method underutilized in training teachers to use technology is to use live modeling sessions. This study qualitatively investigates how the use of modeling sessions impacted students. In this study we found that modeling was perceived by most students to be effective at teaching technology skills and ideas for integrating technology as teachers. However, we identified several breakdowns in the ability of students to transfer their understanding of technology integration to their own situations. We explain this difficulty of transfer of learning and describe five situations when these breakdowns were likely to occur. Implications include the benefits of using live …

Engineering - An Inherently Philosophical Enterprise, William Grimson

Books/Book chapters

No abstract provided.

From Certificates To Doctorates, By Degrees: Dublin Institute Of Technology - A Photographic Memoir, Jimmie Robinson

Books

Jimmie Robinson has photographed visitors and events at Dublin Institute of Technology for 43 years. In this photographic memoir, he chronicles the development of DIT over its first 120 years from behind the lens.

Evolution Of Prehension Ability In An Anthropomorphic Neurorobotic Arm, G Massera

School of Engineering, Computing and Mathematics

In this paper, we show how a simulated anthropomorphic robotic arm controlled by an artificial neural network can develop effective reaching and grasping behaviour through a trial and error process in which the free parameters encode the control rules which regulate the fine-grained interaction between the robot and the environment and variations of the free parameters are retained or discarded on the basis of their effects at the level of the global behaviour exhibited by the robot situated in the environment. The obtained results demonstrate how the proposed methodology allows the robot to produce effective behaviours thanks to its ability …

Ambiguous Women: Debates Within American Evangelical Feminism, A Syska

School of Law, Humanities and Social Sciences

This article is an analysis of major debates within American evangelical feminism since its emergence in early 1970s. It examines ways in which American evangelical feminists negotiate their identity in the daily struggle between the mundane and the sacred, home setting and church practice, and their private and public lives. Through presentation of personal stories and lived experiences it argues that evangelical feminists' ambiguity is a significant and powerful force that not only forges distinctive self-awareness among evangelical feminists, but also shapes diverse understandings of evangelical feminism and shifts the boundaries of both evangelicalism and feminism in America.

Analysis Of Supercritical Stratified Tidal Flow In A Scottish Fjord, Nataliya Stashchuk, Mark Inali, Vasiliy Vlasenko

School of Biological and Marine Sciences

The baroclinic tidal regime of the fjord Loch Etive (Scotland) is studied. Analysis is performed on the basis of both in situ data and numerical simulations, with the use of a fully nonlinear nonhydrostatic fine-resolution model. It was found that the crest of the sill that separates Loch Etive into inner and outer parts is subjected to a supercritical flow regime with maximum Froude numbers in excess of 5. Strong supercritical conditions lead to the formation of flow separation just above the sill's crest. As is inherent to jet-type fjordic systems, this, in turn, leads to a weak nonlinear baroclinic …

A Study Of Linear Error Correcting Codes, Cen Jung Tjhai

School of Engineering, Computing and Mathematics Theses

Since Shannon's ground-breaking work in 1948, there have been two main development streams of channel coding in approaching the limit of communication channels, namely classical coding theory which aims at designing codes with large minimum Hamming distance and probabilistic coding which places the emphasis on low complexity probabilistic decoding using long codes built from simple constituent codes. This work presents some further investigations in these two channel coding development streams. Low-density parity-check (LDPC) codes form a class of capacity-approaching codes with sparse parity-check matrix and low-complexity decoder Two novel methods of constructing algebraic binary LDPC codes are presented. These methods …

An Examination Of The Role Of Intuition In Individual Decision Making In Organisations, Rory Martin, Philomena Hanlon

Conference papers

The feeling of knowing without knowing has often been described as listening to your heart, trusting your gut, or using your intuition. As decision makers face more turbulent and complex environments, rational analysis may not always be able to assist in yielding optimal results. In cases where sufficient data is not available or the situation is one that the decision maker or the organisation has not faced before, the decision maker may utilise intuition to guide them through uncertainty (Lank & Lank 1995:19). This paper looks at the role that intuition plays in individual decision making in organisations. The primary …

Removing Obstacles, Candace Schilling

Illinois Wesleyan University Magazine, 2002-2017

To better grasp the interplay between culture and religion, Professor Brian Hatcher begins by asking some unsettling questions.

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. …

Theories Of Learning And Curriculum Design: Key Positionalities And Their Ralationships, Tony Cunningham, Julie Gannon, Mary Kavanagh, John Greene, Louise Reddy, Laurence Whitson

Level 3

One of the challenges academics face when designing pedagogies and curricula is how best to articulate their own positionalities regarding the different ways theories or models of learning inform both the process of design as well as the product. It is difficult to find a text book or design resource that illustrates the relationships between the main theories of learning and how they might inform a coherent approach to programme design in higher education. For that reason we decided to produce this summative guide to learning theories and a chart illustrating their relevance for pedagogies and for curriculum design.

The …

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 …

Ef Fi Cacy Of Steamer Jet-Injection As Alternative To Chlorine In Fresh-Cut Lettuce, Daniel Rico, Ana Belen Martin-Diana, Jesus Maria Frias, J. Barat, Gary Henehan, Catherine Barry-Ryan

Articles

The use of calcium lactate solutions has been shown to be a healthy alternative to chlorine washing in order to maintain the shelf-life of fresh-cut products. The aim of this research was to analyse the effects of calcium lactate (15 g L⁻¹) treatment at 25 °C and 50 °C (heat-shock) on the textural properties of sliced carrots and to compare those with the chlorine treatment (120 mg L⁻¹) widely used in industry. Several direct and indirect markers of textural changes in carrots during storage were used: Instron textural analysis, Cryo-SEM and optical microscopic, sensory analysis, pectin …