Digital Commons Network^™

Summer 2008

University of Richmond Magazine

No abstract provided.

Gvsu Undergraduate And Graduate Catalog, 2008-2009, Grand Valley State University

Course Catalogs, 1963 - Current

Grand Valley State University 2008-2009 undergraduate and/or graduate course catalog published annually to provide students with information and guidance for enrollment.

Detection Of Kpc-2 In A Clinical Isolate Of Proteus Mirabilis And First Reported Description Of Carbapenemase Resistance Caused By A Kpc Β-Lactamase In P. Mirabilis, Robert J. Tibbetts, Jonathan G. Frye, Jonas Marschall, David K. Warren, W. Michael Dunne, Jr.

Open Access Publications

No abstract provided.

The Effects Of Fertilizers And Mulberry (Morus Alba L. ) Variety On Cocoon And Silk Quality In Kenya, Marion N. Gathumbi

All Master’s Theses

The study was carried out in two sites already with existing mulberry trees comprising three varieties, Kanva , Noi (Thailand), and Embu (local variety). The main objective of the study was to determine the effect of soil fertility and better mulberry varieties (grown locally) on cocoon and silk quality. The study compared the growth and yield performance of the three mulberry varieties being used by farrriers in silkworm rearing. It also involved comparisons of silk production using the three varieties and their quality response due to fertilizer (NPK) and manure treatments. These treatments were applied in 2 sites, ICIPE Farm …

Aku-Nama : Winter 2008, Volume 1, Issue 2, Aga Khan University Alumni Association

The Aga Khan University Newsletter and Magazine for Alumni (AKU-NAMA)

No abstract provided.

The Failed Law Of Latin America, Jorge L. Esquirol

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Unf Journal Winter 2008, University Of North Florida

UNF Journal

A university periodical for alumni and friends of the University of North Florida.

Dimensions Of Mentoring Relationships In The Workplace: A Holistic Perspective, Miriam Grace-Rowland

Antioch University Dissertations & Theses

This was an exploratory study to understand the lived experience of those involved in mentoring relationships within a formal mentoring program in a corporate context. The researcher looked for rich detail about the nature of the relationship from the perspective of the mentor and mentee. To achieve a holistic perspective, the experience of organizational managers was deliberately included in the research. Exploration of this triadic relationship of mentor, mentee, and organizational manager has been neglected in the empirical literature. An exploration of where meaning intersected and diverged among the triad relationship members gave depth to the dimensional frame. Findings suggested …

Evaluating U.S. Federal Marine Protected Areas Programs: A Comparative Analysis And Conceptual Framework, Rosemarie Ann Bradley

Antioch University Dissertations & Theses

Federal area-based marine protection and management in the United States is overseen by the National Marine Sanctuary Program, the National Estuarine Research Reserve System, the National Wildlife Refuge System, the National Park Service, and the National Marine Fisheries Service. Each agency and program represents a different approach to managing the oceans. Currently, no federal agency or program is responsible for evaluating the overall effectiveness of these programs. Evaluation is needed to determine whether programs are achieving their management objectives and conservation goals. Although evaluation protocols are legislatively mandated, implementation is inconsistent across programs.

Federal agencies have been criticized for failing …

Who Owns Ethnography? : The Practitioners Of Contemporary Business Ethnography, Mary Honodel Mccuistion

Master's Theses

No abstract provided.

Comparing Methodologies That Correlate Property Values And Airport Noise, Christian Valdes

Master's Theses

No abstract provided.

Investigation Of Laser Peening Effects On Hydrogen Charged Stainless Steels, Tania M. Zaleski

Master's Theses

No abstract provided.

Modeling And Noise Parameter Extraction Of Nano-Wire Transistors, Pallavi Deshmukh

Master's Theses

No abstract provided.

Investigation Of Laser Peening Effects On Hydrogen Charged Stainless Steels, Tania M. Zaleski

Master's Theses

No abstract provided.

Which: A Stochastic Best-First Search Learner., Zachery A. Milton

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

Rule-based learners search a version space of combinations of features. Starting at “false”, features can be added using disjunctions, conjunctions and negations which can combine to some top-most “true” node that covers all possible examples. A complete search of all possible combinations can be too slow, due to the size of the space, or too error prone, due to noise in the space. When complete search fails, stochastic search may be a useful alternative. For example, the TAR3 “treatment learner” is a stochastic rule learner that leaps around random parts of the version space. TAR favors the construction of tiny …

Cell Surface Expression Of The Vaccinia Virus Complement Control Protein Is Mediated By Interaction With The Viral A56 Protein And Protects Infected Cells From Complement Attack, N. M. Girgis, Brian Dehaven

Biology Faculty Scholarship

The vaccinia virus (VACV) complement control protein (VCP) is the major protein secreted from VACV-infected cells. It has been reported that VCP binds to the surfaces of uninfected cells by interacting with heparan sulfate proteoglycans (HSPGs). In this study, we show that VCP is also expressed on the surfaces of infected cells and demonstrate that surface localization occurs independently of HSPGs. Since VCP does not contain a transmembrane domain, we hypothesized that VCP interacts with a membrane protein that localizes to the infected-cell surface. We show that the VACV A56 membrane protein is necessary for the cell surface expression of …

Motivational Factors Of Seasonal Volunteers: A Study Of The Student Conservation Association, Cory J. Roegner

Graduate Research Papers

The use and efficacy of motivational factors in attracting and retaining employees has become an increasingly important concern within the realm of leisure-service management. Authors of leading text on managing leisure-service organizations have affirmed this dilemma, stating that more research is needed on how to attract, retain, supervise, and motivate employees (Henderson & Bialeschki, 1993; Hoff, Ellis & Crossley, 1988). In recent decades, this need has become particularly true with respect to the motives of seasonal and part-time volunteers (DeGraaf & Edginton, 1992). The field of outdoor recreation/resource management is of no exception. Thus, the purpose of this study was …

Openline Newsletter, January 2008, Civil Service Council

OpenLine Newsletter

A monthly newsletter for Civil Service employees, Volume XXXII, Number 7, January 2008.

Analysis Of The Relationship Between Research Grants And Medical Patents: Are The Number Of Medical Patents Dependent On Nih And Nsf Funding, Jay H. Shah

Undergraduate Economic Review

The United States invests more into basic medical research than any other country. This research, mostly done at medical schools, leads to medical technology patented by private firms through a phenomenon known as knowledge spillover. In light of this relationship, this thesis will investigate the relationship between the public investments in the basic medical research sector and the resulting effect on medical patents, contingent on geographic localization with state-level data. It is hypothesized that the larger the investments awarded to basic medical research organizations, the greater the number of medical patents within the state. Quantifying this relationship has important implications …

Induced Innovation In Non-Hydro Renewable Technologies: The Effects Of Energy Prices And Federal Spending, R. E. Taylor Iv

Undergraduate Economic Review

Our society’s reliance on fossil fuels has many negative results, including compromised national security and foreign relations as well as environmental damage. Many see technology as the key to an improved energy future, and in particular the development of new, cleaner renewable energy sources. The question then remains how to stimulate such technological innovation. In this study, I use U.S. patent data from 1970 to 2001, along with historic energy prices and federal spending data to see the affect energy price and R&D spending have on innovation in the non-hydro renewable energy industries – solar, wind, geothermal, oceanic, and fuel …

An Investigation Of Block Searching Algorithms For Video Frame Codecs, Jerome Casey

Other Resources

Block matching is the most computationally demanding aspect of the video encoding process. In many applications real-time video encoding is desired and therefore it is important that the encoding is fast. Also where handheld devices such as a PDA or mobile phone are concerned a less computationally intensive algorithm means a simpler processor can be used which saves on hardware costs and also extends battery life. An optimised algorithm also allows these devices to be used in low bandwidth wireless networks. The challenge is to decrease the computational load on the system without compromising the quality of the video stream …

Researchnews, Issue 1, Vol. 1, June, 2008, Unknown

Issues

No abstract provided.

A System For Automatically Annotating Traditional Irish Music Field Recordings, Bryan Duggan, Brendan O'Shea, Padraig Cunningham

Conference papers

This paper presents MATT2 (Machine Annotation of Traditional Tunes). MATT2 is a novel system which can automatically annotate field recordings of traditional Irish music with useful metadata such as tune name, key signature, time signature, composer and discography. MATT2 works by using a number of algorithms to automatically transcribe digital audio to be annotated to the ABC music notation language. It then compares these transcriptions against a corpus of 860 human made transcriptions in ABC using a variation of the edit distance algorithm. Results using MATT2 to annotate fifty recordings of flute and fiddle tunes demonstrate a high success rate …

Referring Expression Generation Challenge 2008 Dit System Description, John D. Kelleher, Brian Mac Namee

Conference papers

This section describes the two systems developed at DIT for the attribute selection track of the REG 2008 challenge. Both of theses systems use an incremental greedy search to generate descriptions, similar to the incremental algorithm described in (Dale and Reiter, 1995). The output of these incremental algorithms are, to a large extent, determined by the order in which the algorithm tests the target object’s attributes for inclusion in the description. Indeed, the major difference between the two systems described in this section is the mechanism used to order the attributes for inclusion.

Sweetening The Dataset : Using Active Learning To Label Unlabelled Datasets, Rong Hu, Brian Mac Namee, Sarah Jane Delany

Conference papers

Supervised machine learning approaches assume the existence of a large collection of manually labelled examples of the problem under consideration. However, in many cases such a collection does not exist and creating one is time consuming and expensive. This can be a barrier to the use of supervised learning in certain situations, particularly when the doubt as to whether the system will work or not makes the cost of creating a dataset unjustifable. Active learning is a machine learning technique that has been used widely to create classification systems in the absence of large numbers of labelled examples, but that …

Autopilot: Simulating Changing Concepts In Real Data, Patrick Lindstrom, Sarah Jane Delany, Brian Mac Namee

Conference papers

An increasingly important area in supervised incremental learning is learning in the presence of changing concepts. Research into concept drift is hampered by the lack of availability of controllable `real life' datasets. In this paper we propose an approach for generating real life data over which we have control of the concept and can generate data exhibiting different types of concept drift. The approach uses a 3-D driving game to produce a data stream of instances describing how to drive around a track. The classification problem is learning the driving technique of the driver, which can be affected by changes …

Machine Annotation Of Sets Of Traditional Irish Dance Tunes, Bryan Duggan, Brendan O'Shea, Mikel Gainza, Padraig Cunningham

Conference papers

A set in traditional Irish music is a sequence of two or more dance tunes in the same time signature, where each tune is repeated an arbitrary number of times. A turn in a set represents the point at which either a tune repeats or a new tune is introduced. Tunes in sets are played in a segue (without a pause) and so detecting the turn is a significant challenge. This paper presents the MATS algorithm, a novel algorithm for identifying turns in sets of traditional Irish music. MATS works on digitised audio files of monophonic flute and tin-whistle music. …

Hydrodynamic Aspect Of Caves, Mitja Prelovšek, Janez Turk, Franci Gabrovšek

International Journal of Speleology

From a hydrological point of view, active caves are a series of connected conduits which drain water through an aquifer. Water tends to choose the easiest way through the system but different geological and morphological barriers act as flow restrictions. The number and characteristics of restrictions depends on the particular speleogenetic environment, which is a function of geological, geomorphological, climatological and hydrological settings. Such a variety and heterogeneity of underground systems has presented a challenge for human understanding for many centuries. Access to many underground passages, theoretical knowledge and recent methods (modeling, water pressure-resistant dataloggers, precise sensors etc.) give us …

Integration Of Analysis And Deliberation To Evaluate Biodiesel Occupational And Environmental Exposures, Nora M. Traviss

Antioch University Dissertations & Theses

Many U.S. organizations interested in a renewable and domestic source of energy are considering switching from petroleum diesel to biodiesel blends for transportation and heavy-duty equipment use. Biodiesel is a fuel made from vegetable oils or waste grease. While there is a considerable body of evidence on the negative health effects of petroleum diesel exhaust exposures in occupational and urban settings, there has been little research examining the impact of biodiesel fuel on occupational and environmental exposures. This dissertation combined a collaborative exposure assessment of B20 (20% soy-based biodiesel/80% diesel) at a rural recycling center with a policy intervention to …

Connecting With Nature Through Land Use Decision Making, Cathy Setterlin

Antioch University Dissertations & Theses

This narrative inquiry, which draws on my experience as a land use decision maker, environmental educator, and scholar, examines the complexities of our human-nature relationship as we use and protect the life of the land in local communities. I began this research by interviewing seventeen land use decision makers representing a range of land use perspectives in New Milford, Connecticut, focusing on their views of land as a living community, their connections to land, and their sense of duty and responsibility.

Their responses led me to further inquiry and drew me into a process that transformed my views of both …