Digital Commons Network^™

Toward Open Source Hardware, John R. Ackermann

University of Dayton Law Review

No abstract provided.

Analytic Signals With Nonnegative Instantaneous Frequency, D. V. Vliet

Faculty & Staff Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Measurement Of Phonemic Degradation In Sensorineural Hearing Loss Using A Computational Model Of The Auditory Periphery, Andrew Hines, Naomi Harte

Conference papers

A computational model of the auditory periphery enables faster investigation of new signal processing algorithms for hearing aids. This paper presents a study of the degradation of auditory nerve (AN) responses at a phonetic level for a range of sensorineural hearing losses. The AN model of Zilany & Bruce was used to compute responses to a diverse set of phoneme rich sentences from the TIMIT database. The characteristics of both the average discharge rate and spike timing of the responses are discussed. The experiments demonstrate that the model responses are consistent with respect to impairment and inaudible thresholds.

Error Metrics For Impaired Auditory Nerve Responses Of Different Phoneme Groups, Andrew Hines, Naomi Harte

Conference papers

An auditory nerve model allows faster investigation of new signal processing algorithms for hearing aids. This paper presents a study of the degradation of auditory nerve (AN) responses at a phonetic level for a range of sensorineural hearing losses and flat audiograms. The AN model of Zilany & Bruce was used to compute responses to a diverse set of phoneme rich sentences from the TIMIT database. The characteristics of both the average discharge rate and spike timing of the responses are discussed. The experiments demonstrate that a mean absolute error metric provides a useful measure of average discharge rates but …

Storage, Manipulation, And Visualization Of Lidar Data, Bianca Schoen-Phelan, M. Bertolotto, D. F. Laefer, Sean W. Corish

Conference papers

In recent years, three-dimensional (3D) data has become increasingly available, in part as a result of significant technological progresses in Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR). LiDAR provides longitude and latitude information delivered in conjunction with a GPS device, and elevation information generated by a pulse or phase laser scanner, which together provide an effective way of acquiring accurate 3D information of a terrestrial or manmade feature. The main advantages of LiDAR over conventional surveying methods lie in the high accuracy of the data and the relatively little time needed to scan large geographical areas. LiDAR scans provide a vast amount …

Toward Social Search: From Explicit To Implicit Collaboration To Predict Users' Interests, Luca Longo, Stephen Barrett

Conference papers

Inspection methods and cheap self-reporting procedures have been significantly employed in the field of Human- Computer Interaction for assessing the usability of interfaces, systems and technologies. However, there is a tendency to overlook aspects related to the context and features of the users during the usability assessment process. This research introduces the concept of mental workload as an aid to enhance usability measurement. A user-study has been designed and executed in the context of human-web interaction. The aim was to investigate the relationship between the perception of usability of three popular web-sites, and the mental workload imposed by a set …

Fabrication Of Nanostructured Surfaces With Well-Defined Chemistry Using Particle Lithography, Jie-Ren Li

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Natural self-assembly processes provide nanofabrication capabilities for designing surfaces with nanoscale control of surface chemistry and relative orientation of the nanomaterials on the surfaces. Particle lithography was used to produce periodic arrays of protein nanostructures. Monodisperse mesoparticles can be applied to rapidly prepare millions of uniform protein nanostructures on flat surfaces using the conventional benchtop chemistry steps of mixing, centrifuging, evaporation and drying. Nanopatterns of bovine serum albumin and staphylococcal protein A were produced with particle lithography. The immobilized proteins remain attached to the surface and form nanopatterns over micron areas corresponding to the thickness of a single layer of …

Development Of An Enhanced Generic Data Mining Life Cycle (Dmlc), Markus Hoffmann, Brendan Tierney

Conference papers

Data mining projects are complex and have a high failure rate. In order to improve project management and success rates of such projects a life cycle is vital to the overall success of the project. This paper reports on a research project that was concerned with the life cycle development for large scale data mining projects. The paper provides a detailed view of the design and development of a generic data mining life cycle called DMLC. The life cycle aims to support all members of data mining project teams as well as IT managers and academic researchers and may improve …

The Agricultural Industry As Percieved By Members Of The General Public Of Louisiana, Julie Baker Richard

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

The purpose of this study was to determine the knowledge and perceptions of the animal, plant, environmental, and food sciences by the adult residents of Louisiana. This study was conducted using a survey research design. This survey utilized random telephone dialing techniques in order to survey 547 residents of Louisiana. The survey instrument consisted of fifty-five questions divided into three sections: demographic characteristics, agriculture knowledge, and perception of agriculture. The overall mean agriculture knowledge score of adult residents of Louisiana for the twenty items included in the survey instrument equaled 13.60 (SD = 2.743) or 68%. Perceptions of agriculture results …

Uniarab: An Universal Machine Translator System For Arabic Based On Role And Reference Grammar, Brian Nolan, Yasser Salem

Conference Papers

This paper presents a machine translation system (Hutchins 2003) called UniArab (Salem, Hensman and Nolan 2008). It is a proof-of-concept system supporting the fundamental aspects of Arabic, such as the parts of speech, agreement and tenses. UniArab is based on the linking algorithm of RRG (syntax to semantics and vice versa). UniArab takes MSA Arabic as input in the native orthography, parses the sentence(s) into a logical meta-representation based on the fully expanded RRG logical structures and, using this, generates perfectly grammatical English output with full agreement and morphological resolution. UniArab utilizes an XML-based implementation of elements of the Role …

Task Scheduling And Placement For Reconfigurable Devices, Mostafa Elbidweihy

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Partially reconfigurable devices allow the execution of different tasks at the same time, removing tasks when they finish and inserting new tasks when they arrive. This dissertation investigates scheduling and placing real-time tasks (tasks with deadline) on reconfigurable devices. One basic scheduler is the First-Fit scheduler. By allowing the First-Fit scheduler to retry tasks while they can satisfy their deadlines, we found that its performance can be enhanced to be better than other schedulers. We also proposed a placement idea based on partitioning the reconfigurable area into regions of various widths, assigning a task to a region based on its …

Cross-Disciplinary Approaches For Developing Serious Games In Higher Education: Frameworks For Food Safety And Environmental Health Education, Pauline Rooney, K.C. O'Rourke, Greg Burke, Brian Mac Namee, Claudia Igbrude

Conference papers

While some educators have adopted commercial off the-shelf games for use in the classroom, such games may not always meet the individual requirements of lecturers whose courses are tied to specific learning utcomes. An alternative is to capitalise on in-house expertise in Higher Education and create serious games through cross-disciplinary team projects. This paper outlines such a project within one Higher Education institution. It describes synergies created across disciplines as a result of the collaboration on game design and implementation. It looks at tensions generated between the pedagogical requirements (of lecturers), entertainment objectives (of games designers) and technical excellence (sought …

Compensating For Expressiveness In Queries To A Content Based Music Information Retrieval System, Bryan Duggan, Brendan O'Shea, Mikel Gainza, Padraig Cunningham

Conference papers

MATT2 is a content based music information retrieval system adapted to the characteristics of traditional Irish dance music. MATT2 compensates for expressive artefacts commonly employed by traditional musicians. Specifically these are ornamentation, "the long note", reversing and phrasing. In this paper we describe the main components of MATT2 and present an experiment where we demonstrate that using this higher level knowledge of melodic similarity in traditional Irish dance music results in a significant improvement in annotation accuracy over standard approaches from the MIR literature.

Forked:A Demonstration Of Physics Realism In Augmented Reality, David Beaney, Brian Mac Namee

Conference papers

In making fully immersive augmented reality (AR) applications, real and virtual objects will have to be seen to physically interact together in a realistic and believable way. This paper describes Forked! a system that has been developed to show how physical interactions between real and virtual objects can be simulated re- alistically and believably through appropriate use of a physics en- gine. The system allows users control a robotic forklift to manipu- late virtual crates in an AR environment. The paper also describes a evaluation experiment in which it is shown that the physical inter- actions between the forklift and …

Gathering Datasets For Activity Identification, Lorcan Coyle, Juan Ye, Susan Mckeever, Stephen Knox, Mathew Staelber, Simon Dobson, Paddy Nixon

Conference papers

The area of activity identification is maturing well in the HCI and ubiquitous computing fields. However, although algorithm development is proceedings well, without publicly available datasets on which to compare results it is difficult to consolidate the disparate work being done. This problem exists because realistic datasets describing human activity are difficult and expensive to gather and because there are significant barriers to releasing the data once gathered. We review positive recent development with the release of two high-quality datasets. From our experiences using these datasets we list some recommendations for the gathering and release of future datasets. Finally, we …

Generating Natural Language Descriptions Of Ontology Concepts, Niels Schütte

Conference papers

This paper gives an overview of ongoing work on a system for the generation of NL descriptions of classes defined in OWL ontologies. We present a general structuring approach for such descriptions. Since OWL ontologies do not by default contain the information necessary for lexicalization, lexical information has to be added to the data via annotations. A rulebased mechanism for automatically deriving these annotations is presented.

Carbon Capture And Sequestration: Identifying And Managing Risks, Alexandra B. Klass, Elizabeth J. Wilson

Articles

Carbon capture and geologic sequestration (CCS) technology promises to provide deep emissions cuts, particularly from coal power generation, but deploying CCS creates risks of its own. This article first considers the risks associated with CCS, which involves capturing CO{sub 2} emissions from industrial sources and power plants, transporting the CO{sub 2} by pipeline, and injecting it underground for permanent sequestration. The article then suggests ways in which these risks can be minimized and managed and considers more broadly when or if CCS should be deployed or whether its use should be limited or rejected in favor of other solutions.

A Metaheuristic For The Pickup And Delivery Problem With Split-Loads And Its Extension, Dai Yao

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

In this dissertation, we study improvements in the Pickup and Delivery Problem that can be achieved by allowing multiple vehicle trips to serve a common load. We explore how costs can be reduced through the elimination of the constraint that a load must be served by only one vehicle trip. Specifically, we investigate the problem of routing vehicles to serve loads that have distinct origins and destinations, with no constraint on the amount of a load that a vehicle may serve at a time. We develop a metaheuristic to solve large scale practical size problems in this form and apply …

Does Morningstar Shine In The Universe Of Mutual Funds? A Study On Morningstar Mutual Fund Ratings, Wee Seng Ng

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

Using data from Morningstar Principia CDs and employing standard methodologies, we examine the extent to which two mutual fund ratings: Morningstar star ratings and Morningstar stewardship grades can predict future fund performance. In particular, we investigate whether the combined predictive power of the two ratings exceeds that of a single rating. We decompose funds into various groups characterized by fund age and fund categories in order to address such issues as whether predictive performance is uniform across characteristic-based groups. Although our analysis shows that none of the ratings alone possesses strong predictive power, there is statistical evidence to support the …

The Effects Of Patent Characteristics As Signals On The Growth Of Follow-On Innovations: Evidence From Chinese Patenting Activities In U.S, Wenxin Guo

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

As global trade and business activities intensified, cross-national patenting activities have been playing an increasingly important role in the process of innovation accumulation and growth. However, few studies (to my knowledge) have examined the characteristics of cross-national patents and their relationship to the accumulation and growth of innovation, especially in the context of a developing versus a developed country.
Motivated by the anecdotal evidence and `Patent Signaling Theory'(Spence, 1973), I investigate the possible influential factors on the `quality' of a US patent with a Chinese priority (thereafter `US-CN' patent) and their impact on the growth of follow-on innovation. By developing …

Southwinds - Spring 2009

Southwinds: The Literary and Arts Magazine of Missouri S&T

THE LITERARY MAGAZINE OF MISSOURI UNIVERSITY OF SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY SPRING 2009 Southwinds is sponsored by the Department of English & Technical Communication

The Rollamo 2009, Missouri University Of Science And Technology

Yearbooks

No abstract provided.

System And Method For Quantitative Imaging Of Chemical Composition To Decompose Multiple Materials, Xin Liu, L. Yu, C. H. Mccollough

Nuclear Engineering and Radiation Science Faculty Research & Creative Works

The present invention provides a material decomposition method capable of determining the distribution of density and constituent material concentration throughout an imaged object. The concentration, in the form of a mass fraction, mass percent, weight fraction, or weight percent, is determined from CT images acquired at different energy levels. The ratio of attenuation coefficients associated with one energy level to attenuation coefficients associated with another energy level is determined and used as an index in a lookup table to determine the concentration of a given material throughout the imaged object.

Golan V. Gonzalez And The Changing Balance Between The First Amendment, Copyright Protection, And The Rest Of The World, Carrie Claiborne

Denver Law Review

No abstract provided.

Danger - Bombs May Be Present - Cannon V. Gates: A Jammed Cannon Preempts Citizen Suit Indefinitely, Theresa Sauer

Denver Law Review

No abstract provided.

Laboratory Schools Annual Report, 2008-2009, Laboratory Schools, Illinois State University

Annual Reports – Laboratory Schools

Illinois State University Laboratory Schools annual report

Youth Volunteerism: By Looking At Who Volunteers And Why Organizations May Be Able To Recruit Youth To Become Long-Standing Volunteers, Kathryn M. Zimmerly

Graduate Research Papers

In 1835 Alexis de Tocqueville suggested volunteerism could reduce antisocial or criminal behavior (Uggen and Janikula, 1999). When looking at volunteerism today researchers have concluded similar aspects; for example, Uggen and Janikula found in their 1999 research that volunteers had increased self -acceptance, instrumentality, and civic identity.

Research by the Independent Sector suggests that 70 percent of youth volunteers feel volunteering is important because it gives them a new perspective, allows them to participate for a good cause, and gives them a greater respect for the people they are helping. Youth volunteer levels have increased (to 70 percent from 59 …

Living Originalism, Peter J. Smith, Thomas Colby

GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works

Originalists routinely argue that originalism is the only coherent and legitimate theory of constitutional interpretation. This Article endeavors to undermine those claims by demonstrating that, despite the suggestion of originalist rhetoric, originalism is not a single, coherent, unified theory of constitutional interpretation, but is rather a disparate collection of distinct constitutional theories that share little more than a misleading reliance on a common label. Originalists generally agree only on certain very broad precepts that serve as the fundamental underlying principles of constitutional interpretation: specifically, that the “writtenness” of the Constitution necessitates a fixed constitutional meaning, and that courts that see …

Determination Of Partition And Activity Coefficients Using Headspace- Gas Chromatography, Gregory Paul Bullock

Seton Hall University Dissertations and Theses (ETDs)

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The Freshwater Mussels (Mollusca: Bivalvia: Unionidae) Of The Channelized Missouri River, Ellet Hoke

Journal of the Iowa Academy of Science: JIAS

The lower Missouri River has historically been viewed as a fauna! barrier for unionids due to high sediment load. However this survey of the lower (channelized) Missouri River documented the presence of 14 unionid species and the exotic Corbicula fluminea (Muller, 1774). Unionids are present in stable substrates sheltered from the effects of the river's strong currents. Analysis of early literature on the Missouri River suggests reports of an absence of unionids were not based upon thorough fieldwork, and the most commonly cited rationale for their reported absence, the high sediment load in the river, is not convincing. Pre-1938 unionid …