Digital Commons Network^™

Annual Reports Of The Town Of Seabrook, New Hampshire For The Year Ending December 31st, 2006 As Compiled By The Town Officers., Seabrook Town Representatives

Seabrook, NH Annual Reports

This is an annual report containing vital statistics for a town/city in the state of New Hampshire.

Distance From Family, Years Of Life On Reservation/Village, Level Of Acculturation, Gender, And Acculturation Stress Of American Indian/Alaska Native Students At The University Of Montana, Michael Brian Trahan

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Acculturation is a construct that supposes that two or more cultures interact and are in conflict with one another, and an individual can determine which qualities to adhere to from each culture. Acculturation stress is a product of the acculturation process, in which an individual experiences stress as a result of the interaction of the multiple cultures upon the individual. This study examined the effects of acculturation stress on 41 (14 male and 27 female) American Indian/Alaska Native (AI/AN) university students in an effort to determine whether this stress is related to level of acculturation, years lived on an Indian …

Obstacle And Terrain Avoidance For Miniature Aerial Vehicles, Timothy Mclain, Jeff Saunders, Blake Barber, Randall W. Beard, Stephen R. Griffiths

Faculty Publications

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are playing increasingly prominent roles in defense programs and strategy around the world. Technology advancements have enabled the development of large UAVs (e.g., Global Hawk, Predator) and the creation of smaller, increasingly capable UAVs. The focus of this Chapter is on smaller fixed-wing miniature aerial vehicles (MAVs), which range in size from % to 2 m in wingspan. As recent conflicts have demonstrated, there are numerous military applications for MAVs including reconnaissance, surveillance, battle damage assessment, and communications relays.

Empowering Or Compelling Reluctant Participators Using Audience Response Systems, Charles R. Graham, Tonya R. Tripp, Larry Seawright, George L. Joeckel Iii

Faculty Publications

This article investigates the impact of an audience response system (ARS) on student engagement in undergraduate university courses. A survey was administered to students in a dozen courses piloting the ARS system. On 13 out of 14 measures the majority of students thought the system was helpful. Overall, students were more positive about the use of the ARS in courses that used the tool for formative feedback (empowering) rather than for grading or attendance purposes (compelling). The authors discuss the positive impact of the ARS on the engagement of ‘reluctant participators’ or students who reported that they are least likely …

Information Sharing And Supply Chain Performance: The Role Of Connectivity And Willingness, Stanley E. Fawcett, Paul Osterhaus, Gregory M. Magnan, James C. Brau, Matthew W. Mccarter

Faculty Publications

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to understand how information technology (IT) is used to enhance supply chain performance.

Design/methodology/approach – A large-scale survey and semi-structured interviews were used to collect industry data.

Findings – Two distinct dimensions to information sharing – connectivity and willingness – are identified and analyzed. Both dimensions are found to impact operational performance and to be critical to the development of a real information sharing capability. However, many companies are found to have placed most of their emphasis on connectivity, often overlooking the willingness construct. As a result, information sharing seldom delivers on …

Educational Technology: Beyond The Basics, John Shimer

International Christian Community of Teacher Educators Journal

This paper addresses classroom technology as a much deeper concept than many would like to believe. It is not something to be taken lightly by only looking at what is currently available, but rather examined through a brief history, in-depth tests, and the consequences as well as the benefits of new developing technology. Furthermore it is not an issue only important for educators and administrators but requires involvement from parents and more importantly Christians to ensure that students are given the greatest opportunity possible for their future. Since technology is the future of children’s education, it is imperative that it …

Effects Of Moisture On Ignition Behavior Of Moist California Chaparral And Utah Leaves, Thomas H. Fletcher, Brent M. Pickett, Steven G. Smith, Gregory S. Spittle, Megan M. Woodhouse, Elizabeth Haake, David R. Weise

Faculty Publications

Individual cuttings from eight plant species native to California chaparral or Utah were burned in a well-controlled, well-instrumented facility. Gas temperatures above a flat-flame burner were controlled at 987 C and 10 mol% O₂, resulting in a heat flux at the leaf surface varying from 80–140 kW/m². High moisture leaves were observed to burst due to the rapid escape of vapor from the leaf interior. Bubbles in or on the leaf surface were observed for leaves with moderate moisture contents. A large number of leaf temperature measurements were made, along with measurements of the ignition time …

Model Compound Study Of The Pathways For Aromatic Hydrocarbon Formation In Soot, Randall E. Winans, Nancy A. Tomczyk, Jerry E. Hunt, Mark S. Solum, Ronald J. Pugmire, Thomas H. Fletcher

Faculty Publications

As a follow-up of previous work on the flame pyrolysis of biphenyl and pyrene, a more detailed analysis of the pyrolytic products has been done using additional NMR data obtained on the whole soot sample correlated with detailed high-resolution and GC mass spectrometry data on the solvent-extracted portion of the same samples. These latter data complement the earlier NMR data with details of the pre-sooting structures, referred to as “young soot”, in pyrolyzed biphenyl samples collected at 1365, 1410, and 1470 K and pyrene at 1410 and 1470 K. The data reveal the roles played by free-radical-assisted polymerization reactions as …

Generating Ontologies Via Language Components And Ontology Reuse, Deryle W. Lonsdale, Yihong Ding, David W. Embley, Martin Hepp, Li Xu

Faculty Publications

Realizing the Semantic Web involves creating ontologies, a tedious and costly challenge. Reuse can reduce the cost of ontology engineering. Semantic Web ontologies can provide useful input for ontology reuse. However, the automated reuse of such ontologies remains underexplored. This paper presents a generic architecture for automated ontology reuse. With our implementation of this architecture, we show the practicality of automating ontology generation through ontology reuse. We experimented with a large generic ontology as a basis for automatically generating domain ontologies that fit the scope of sample natural-language web pages. The results were encouraging, resulting in five lessons pertinent to …

Analogical Modeling: An Update, Deryle W. Lonsdale, David Eddington

Faculty Publications

Analogical modeling is a supervised exemplar-based approach that has been widely applied to predict linguistic behavior. The paradigm has been well documented in the linguistics and cognition literature, but is less well known to the machine learning community. This paper sets out some of the basics of the approach, including a simplified example of the fundamental algorithm’s operation. It then surveys some of the recent analogical modeling language applications, and sketches how the computational system has been enhanced lately to offer users increased flexibility and processing power. Some comparisons and contrasts are drawn between analogical modeling and other language modeling …

Active Learning For Part-Of-Speech Tagging: Accelerating Corpus Annotation, Deryle W. Lonsdale, Eric K. Ringger, Peter J. Mcclanahan, Robbie A. Haertel, George Busby, Marc A. Carmen, James Carroll, Kevin Seppi

Faculty Publications

In the construction of a part-of-speech annotated corpus, we are constrained by a fixed budget. A fully annotated corpus is required, but we can afford to label only a subset. We train a Maximum Entropy Markov Model tagger from a labeled subset and automatically tag the remainder. This paper addresses the question of where to focus our manual tagging efforts in order to deliver an annotation of highest quality. In this context, we find that active learning is always helpful. We focus on Query by Uncertainty (QBU) and Query by Committee (QBC) and report on experiments with several baselines and …

Bioprospecting For Useful Compounds In The Venom Of Crematogaster Ants, Robert E. Mccurdy

Harriet L Wilkes Honors College Theses 2003 - 2009

Bioprospecting, the search for useful compounds in nature, has led to the discovery of many important pharmaceuticals. Most current bioprospecting efforts work with chemicals derived from marine invertebrates and terrestrial plants. I looked for useful compounds in a relatively unstudied source, the venom of Crematogaster ants, using Gas Chromatography-Mass Spectroscopy (GC-MS). Further studies can more accurately identify these chemicals using High Pressure Liquid Chromatography (HPLC) and Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR).

Breeding Season And Fecundity Of Gopherus Polyphemus In South Florida, Melody. Strattan

Harriet L Wilkes Honors College Theses 2003 - 2009

The gopher tortoise, Gopherus polyphemus, is a threatened species native to the southeastern United States. The breeding season of G. polyphemus is reportedly from April to June. However, out of season hatchlings in Jupiter, Florida, suggest that in South Florida, the very southernmost part of the gopher tortoise's range, the warmer climate allows a longer period of reproduction or a year-round breeding season. My research sought to find evidence for an extended breeding season and to collect fecundity data on the South Florida tortoises by capturing female tortoises and X-raying them at different times of the year to check for …

Corals On Seamounts, Ad Rogers, A Baco, H Griffiths, Jm Hall-Spencer

School of Biological and Marine Sciences

No abstract provided.

2007-2008 Unm Catalog, Unm Office Of The Registrar

Course Catalogs

Course catalog for the years 2007-2008.

Annual Economic Outlook Conference_Jan 2007, University Of New Mexico Bureau Of Business And Economic Research

BBER Publications

This report provides an overview of New Mexico's economic conditions, including employment, income, population growth, tourism, exports, manufacturing, and county-level demographic indicators. The volume combines economic forecasts with extensive state and local datasets intended to support business, government, and academic research.

Neutrosophy In Arabic Philosophy, Florentin Smarandache, Salah Osman

Branch Mathematics and Statistics Faculty and Staff Publications

Is there an absolute reality? Yes, “God” is the only absolute reality. The three main religions: Judaism, Christianity and Islam have all claimed that God is a supreme reality, and that all other creatures are finite beings. Since they relatively continue and also relatively change, so they can not be absolute. The world is full of paradoxes, there is no absolute persistence, and also there is no change at a stretch. There is no absolute truth and there is no continuous falsehood. What exist are many faces or aspects between the two terms. Those faces are reduced to a neutral …

Techno-Art Of Selariu Supermathematics Functions, Florentin Smarandache

Branch Mathematics and Statistics Faculty and Staff Publications

In this album we include the so called Super-Mathematics functions (SMF), which constitute the base for, most often, generating, technical, neo-geometrical objects, therefore less artistic. These functions are the results of 38 years of research, which began at University of Stuttgart in 1969. Since then, 42 related works have been published, written by over 19 authors, as shown in the References. The name was given by the regretted mathematician Professor Emeritus Doctor Engineer Gheorghe Silas who, at the presentation of the very first work in this domain, during the First National Conference of Vibrations in Machine Constructions, Timişoara, Romania, 1978, …

National Culture And Its Effects On Knowledge Communication In Online Virtual Communities, Keng Siau, Fiona Fui-Hoon Nah, Min Ling

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Online virtual communities provide a powerful means of knowledge sharing. Despite the prevalence of online virtual communities, there is a paucity of research to investigate the effect of national culture differences on knowledge sharing in online virtual communities. Are there differences between online virtual communities from different national cultures? This research studies the differences in knowledge-sharing activities between US-based and China-based online virtual communities. Hofstede's dimensions of national culture serve as the theoretical foundation for this research.

Islamic Education In China: Rebuilding Communities And Expanding Local And International Networks, Jackie Armijo

All Works

Over the last twenty years a wide range of Islamic educational opportunities have been developed to meet the needs of China's 20 million plus Muslim population. In addition to mosque schools, government Islamic colleges, and independent Islamic colleges, a growing number of students have gone overseas to continue their studies at international Islamic universities in Egypt, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Iran, and Malaysia.

Image Segmentation Using Multi-Coloured Active Illumination, Tze Ki (Xu Shuqi) Koh, Nicholas Miles, Barrie Hayes-Gill

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this paper, the use of active illumination is extended to image segmentation, specifically in the case of overlapping particles. This work is based on Multi-Flash Imaging (MFI), originally developed by Mitsubishi Electric Labs, to detect depth discontinuities. Illuminations of different wavelengths are projected from multiple positions, providing additional information about a scene compared to conventional segmentation techniques. Shadows are used to identify true object edges. The identification of non- occluded particles is made possible by exploiting the fact that shadows are cast on underlying particles. Implementation issues such as selecting the appropriate colour model and number of illuminations are …

Iterated Weaker-Than-Weak Dominance, Shih-Fen Cheng, Michael P. Wellman

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We introduce a weakening of standard gametheoretic δ-dominance conditions, called dominance, which enables more aggressive pruning of candidate strategies at the cost of solution accuracy. Equilibria of a game obtained by eliminating a δ-dominated strategy are guaranteed to be approximate equilibria of the original game, with degree of approximation bounded by the dominance parameter. We can apply elimination of δ-dominated strategies iteratively, but the for which a strategy may be eliminated depends on prior eliminations. We discuss implications of this order independence, and propose greedy heuristics for determining a sequence of eliminations to reduce the game as far as possible …

Towards Efficient Computation Of Quality Bounded Solutions In Pomdps: Expected Value Approximation And Dynamic Disjunctive Beliefs, Pradeep Reddy Varakantham, Rajiv Maheswaran, Tapana Gupta, Milind Tambe

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

While POMDPs (partially observable markov decision problems) are a popular computational model with wide-ranging applications, the computational cost for optimal policy generation is prohibitive. Researchers are investigating ever-more efficient algorithms, yet many applications demand such algorithms bound any loss in policy quality when chasing efficiency. To address this challenge, we present two new techniques. The first approximates in the value space to obtain solutions efficiently for a pre-specified error bound. Unlike existing techniques, our technique guarantees the resulting policy will meet this bound. Furthermore, it does not require costly computations to determine the quality loss of the policy. Our second …

Real-Time Supply Chain Control Via Multi-Agent Adjustable Autonomy, Hoong Chuin Lau, Lucas Agussurja, Ramesh Thangarajoo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Real-time supply chain management in a rapidly changing environment requires reactive and dynamic collaboration among participating entities. In this work, we model supply chain as a multi-agent system where agents are subject to an adjustable autonomy. The autonomy of an agent refers to its capability to make and influence decisions within a multi-agent system. Adjustable autonomy means changing the autonomy of the agents during runtime as a response to changes in the environment. In the context of a supply chain, different entities will have different autonomy levels and objective functions as the environment changes, and the goal is to design …

An Improvement Heuristic For The Timetabling Problem, Aldy Gunawan, Kien Ming Ng, Kim Leng Poh

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This paper formulates a timetabling problem, which is often encountered in a university, as a mathematical programming model. The proposed model combines both teacher assignment and course scheduling problems simultaneously, which causes the entire model to become more complex. We propose an improvement heuristic algorithm to solve such a model. The proposed algorithm has been tested with several randomly generated datasets of sizes that are comparable to those occurring in a university in Indonesia. The computational results show that the improvement heuristic is not only able to obtain good solutions, but is also able to do so within reasonable computational …

A Growth Theory Perspective On The International Diffusion Of Electronic Commerce., S.C Ho, Robert John Kauffman, T.P. Liang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Information and communication technologies (ICTs) continue to have a profound effect on the economies and societies where they are used. In this article, we propose three related theories to describe the underlying mechanism for growth in e-commerce revenues at the national level. Endogenous growth theory posits that the primary drivers of e-commerce growth are internal to a country. Exogenous growth theory suggests that the primary drivers of e-commerce growth are external to an economic system, and reflect the forces of the regional economy. A blend of these, a mixed endogenous–exogenous growth theory, incorporates drivers from both the economy and …

Anticipatory Event Detection Via Classification, He Qi, Kuiyu Chang, Ee Peng Lim

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The idea of event detection is to identify interesting patterns from a constant stream of incoming news documents. Previous research in event detection has largely focused on identifying the first event or tracking subsequent events belonging to a set of pre-assigned topics such as earthquakes, airline disasters, etc. In this paper, we describe a new problem, called anticipatory event detection (AED), which aims to detect if a user-specified event has transpired. AED can be viewed as a personalized combination of event tracking and new event detection. We propose using sentence-level and document-level classification approaches to solve the AED problem for …

The Endangered, Rick Mabrey

Theses

This writing project is a culmination of essays based on my personal experiences as an educator, and an environmentalist. The work illustrates a mindset of abuse and neglect that harms nature, and mistreats children. It offers hope through those who will nurture and not turn their back on the problems of society.

The endangered list no longer singles out animals in the wild. It now includes what is left of the open land, the healthy waterways, and many of the kids I teach.

St. Francis of Assisi said, "Not to hurt our humble brethren is our first duty to them, …

Indian Giver: A Screenplay In Three Acts, Brandon R. Mckinney

Theses

The texts and accompanying media bound herein represent the culmination of an intensive course of study focused on writing for the screen, or screenwriting, and are submitted as partial fulfillment of Lindenwood University's requirements for the degree of master of fine arts.

This culminating project is comprised of a feature-length motion picture screenplay, an accompanying introduction to the author/explanation of the screenplay, and a DVD copy of a televised discussion program (hosted by the author with a professional Hollywood screenwriter as guest) dealing with the craft of screenwriting.

The screenplay, titled Indian Giver, expands on the basic comedic premise of …

Axon And Dendrite Geography Predict The Specificity Of Synaptic Connections In A Functioning Spinal Cord Network, Wc Li, T Cooke, B Sautois, Et Al

School of Engineering, Computing and Mathematics

Background: How specific are the synaptic connections formed as neuronal networks develop and can simple rules account for the formation of functioning circuits? These questions are assessed in the spinal circuits controlling swimming in hatchling frog tadpoles. This is possible because detailed information is now available on the identity and synaptic connections of the main types of neuron. Results: The probabilities of synapses between 7 types of identified spinal neuron were measured directly by making electrical recordings from 500 pairs of neurons. For the same neuron types, the dorso-ventral distributions of axons and dendrites were measured and then used to …