Digital Commons Network^™

Organizational Slack, International Expansion And Firm Profitability, Anran Liu

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

International expansion is a viable growth strategy for firms operating in an increasingly competitive business environment. Understanding the relationship between international expansion and firm performance has been a significant concern for theory development in the strategy and international business literature. The extant literature, however, has paid insufficient attention to the tradeoff between firm growth and profitability that may imply the existence of an optimal rate of growth. Drawing from the Penrosian perspective that emphasizes the role of resources in firm growth, this study investigates whether and how firm slack resources affect the tradeoff between international expansion and profitability. Specifically, this …

Scanning Acoustic Microscopy For Gdl Water Distribution Characterization, Christopher Mcdade

Theses

The objective of this research was to identify and apply possible acoustic imaging techniques for water transport studies in PEM fuel cell diffusion mediums. To accomplish this, a scanning acoustic microscope (SAM) was designed and built along with dedicated control and analysis software to implement all investigative tests and scans. The results of the study were in two parts, acoustic response characterization of the fibrous material and implementation of the developed imaging technique for water saturation distribution characterization. Having used a focused 30MHz centered wide band transducer with focal point FWHM beam diameter of 90 microns the target material ensured …

First Mesozoic Record Of The Stingray Myliobatis Wurnoensis From Mali And A Phylogenetic Analysis Of Myliobatidae Incorporating Dental Characters, Kerin M. Claeson, Maureen A. O'Leary, Eric M. Roberts, Famory Sissoko, Mamadou Bouare, Leif Tapanila, David Goodwin, Michael D. Gottfried

PCOM Scholarly Works

New specimens, including the first record of lower dental plates, of the extinct myliobatid Myliubatis wurnoensis were recovered from the Maastrichtian (Late Cretaceous) of the Iullemmeden Basin, Mali, and are the oldest record of the taxon. We evaluated the phylogenetic position of this taxon with reference to other myliobatids (extinct and extant) using osteology and dentition. Our results indicate that Myliobatinae and Myliobatis are each paraphyletic, and that Aetobatus and Rhinoptera are monophyletic. We also found that taxa known only from the Cretaceous, Brachyrhizodus and Igdabatis, are highly nested within Myliobatidae. The phylogenetic position of these taxa unambiguously extends the …

Understanding Materials, Petros J. Katsioloudis

STEMPS Faculty Publications

The article discusses the importance of understanding the characteristics of materials that will be used for different applications. Through the years, the inventions and innovations in the technology of materials are becoming more technologically complex. Innovations in the materials are divided in different categories, including metals, ceramics, polymers and composites. Example of such innovations in the technology of materials include the ceramic composite applied to the surface of the space shuttle panels to absorb and release high amounts of heat.

Development Of A Platform For Simulating And Optimizing Thermoelectric Energy Systems, John Kreuder

Theses

Thermoelectrics are solid state devices that can convert thermal energy directly into electrical energy. They have historically been used only in niche applications because of their relatively low efficiencies. With the advent of nanotechnology and improved manufacturing processes thermoelectric materials have become less costly and more efficient As next generation thermoelectric materials become available there is a need for industries to quickly and cost effectively seek out feasible applications for thermoelectric heat recovery platforms. Determining the technical and economic feasibility of such systems requires a model that predicts performance at the system level. Current models focus on specific system applications …

Auto-Generation Of Use Case Controllers, Pushkar Marathe

Master's Projects

The thesis is based on the concept of generating machine executable code from UML diagrams. There has been some research done on the same topic but it is mainly focused on class diagrams. My main focus will be on the use case diagrams, and sequence diagrams. Sequence diagrams give us the details of any process in a step-by-step fashion which makes it easier to extract the required information regarding the use cases and the controllers which help us generate the code. The process follows three steps, first being generation of UML diagrams. Secondly, these are converted into XMI (XML Metadata …

Document Builder, Thien Tran

Master's Projects

In this paper, we consider problems related to on-demand content publishing and maintenance. Specifically, we are concerned with the recent concept of structural Content Management Systems (CMS) and its design principles. We focus on Apache Ant, a popular document generator tool for the Java development industry. However, Ant has not been widely extended beyond its capacity to deal with computer programs, which limits its utility. We analyze the Ant build script structure, study its usage, and implement an on-demand document generator for Ant. The focus is to provide a better document build model based on Ant, which can provide document …

Metamorphic Viruses With Built-In Buffer Overflow, Ronak Shah

Master's Projects

Metamorphic computer viruses change their structure—and thereby their signature—each time they infect a system. Metamorphic viruses are potentially one of the most dangerous types of computer viruses because they are difficult to detect using signature-based methods. Most anti-virus software today is based on signature detection techniques. In this project, we create and analyze a metamorphic virus toolkit which creates viruses with a built-in buffer overflow. The buffer overflow serves to obfuscate the entry point of the actual virus, thereby making detection more challenging. We show that the resulting viruses successfully evade detection by commercial virus scanners. Several modern operating systems …

Wisenetor: A Scalable Wireless Sensor Network Simulator, Gauri Krishna Gokhale

Master's Projects

WiSeNetor is a teaching and a research tool that simulates a scalable wireless sensor network on a single computer, based on the “Spamulator” (Aycock, J., Crawford, H., & deGraaf, R., 2008) which simulates the Internet on a single computer. Routing protocols and network discovery algorithms used in mesh networks and cluster tree networks can be demonstrated using this tool. WiSeNetor contains a network creation module, simulated network devices and it simulates routing algorithms. The network creation module spawns a network according to user specified network type, where the type can be a cluster tree or mesh. In this process, neighbor …

Field‐Derived Henry's Law Constants For Polychlorinated Biphenyls In Oceanic Waters, Rosalinda Gioia, Kevin C. Jones, Rainer Lohmann, Luca Nizzetto, Jordi Dachs

Graduate School of Oceanography Faculty Publications

Accurate knowledge of Henry's law constants (K_aw) is very important for fate and transport studies of organic chemicals. Here field‐derived K_aw values for polychlorinated biphenyl (PCB) congeners (PCBs 28, 49, 52, 118, 138, 149, and 153) were determined in the open Atlantic Ocean, at locations where air and seawater were assumed to be at equilibrium. Field‐based K_aw values were derived from air and seawater samples simultaneously collected at these locations, and their relationship with temperature was determined. The average field‐derived K_aw for PCBs 28, 49, 52, 118, and 138 was generally 2–3 times higher …

The Consequence Of Human Differences, Jospeh Vining

Articles

This essay explores the ways in which the recognition of individual and person in the legal form of thought distinguishes it from forms of thought in evolutionary biology and mathematics that are put forward as means to a complete picture of the world. The essay observes that the legal form of thought is in fact deeply involved in our modern understanding of Nature itself.

An Outsider's View Of Dassonville And Cassis De Dijon: On Interpretation And Policy, Donald Regan

Articles

My interest in the EC law on free movement of goods is long-standing and more than casual, but much less than scholarly. So I am delighted to contribute some remarks without pretending to expertise.

Scala Server Faces, Vikas Vittal Rao

Master's Projects

Progress in the Java language has been slow over the last few years. Scala is emerging as one of the probable successors for Java with features such as type inference, higher order functions, closure support and sequence comprehensions. This allows object-oriented yet concise code to be written using Scala. While Java based MVC frameworks are still prevalent, Scala based frameworks along with Ruby on Rails, Django and PHP are emerging as competitors. Scala has a web framework called Lift which has made an attempt to borrow the advantages of other frameworks while keeping code concise. Since Sun’s MVC framework, Java …

A Framework For Active Learning: Revisited, Yue Chen

Master's Projects

Over the past decade, algorithm visualization tools have been researched and developed to be used by Computer Science instructors to ease students’ learning curve for new concepts. However, limitations such as rigid animation frameworks, lack of user interaction with the visualization created, and learning a new language and environment, have severely reduced instructors’ desire to use such a tool. The purpose of this project is to create a tool that overcomes these limitations. Instructors do not have to get familiar with a new framework and learn another language. The API used to create algorithm animation for this project is through …

Bookmarklet Builder For Offline Data Retrieval, Sheetal Naidu

Master's Projects

Bookmarklet Builder for Offline Data Retrieval is a computer application which will allow users to view websites even when they are offline. It can be stored as a URL of a bookmark in the browser. Bookmarklets exist for storing single web pages in hand-held devices and these web pages are stored as PDF files. In this project we have developed a tool that can save entire web page applications as bookmarklets. This will enable users to use these applications even when they are not connected to the Internet. The main technology beyond Javascript used to achieve this is the data: …

Open Source Analysis Of Biomedical Figures, David Shao

Master's Projects

With a selection of biomedical literature available for open access, a natural pairing seems to be the use of open source software to automatically analyze content, in particular, the content of gures. Considering the large number of possible tools and approaches, we choose to focus on the recognition of printed characters. As the problem of optical character recognition (OCR) under rea- sonable conditions is considered to be solved, and as open source software is fully capable of isolating the location of characters and identifying most of them accurately, we instead use OCR as an application area for the relatively recent …

Enhancing Open-Source Localization, Farzana Forhad

Master's Projects

Pootle is a web portal which is designed to be a web translation tool. We can run Pootle like an internet server and run a local copy on an intranet. Pootle has a user friendly interface which ensures better quality and easier translation of projects. Users can log into the Pootle and create their own projects under any language, and they can also add or retrieve any language from any project or any project from any language. Although Pootle has many advantages, it also has its drawbacks, and one of the biggest drawbacks of Pootle is that whatever translation is …

The Activelecture System, Sanuja Dabade

Master's Projects

For an instructor, it has always been a challenging task to keep students engaged during the lecture and assess them in real time. Instructors use different methodologies to address the challenge of keeping students engaged during the class and increase their participation. Widely used methodologies for active learning include clickers and Tablet PCs. Clickers are small handheld devices which are used to collect student responses and present these responses graphically. Tablet PCs provide a functionality to use natural handwriting to provide feedback. Web browsers are a cost effective approaches. I have used a web based technology to create active learning …

Exhaustive Statistical Analysis For Detection Of Metamorphic Malware, Aditya Govindaraju

Master's Projects

Malware is a serious threat to the security of the system. With the widespread use of the World Wide Web, there has been a tremendous increase in virus attacks, making computer security an essential for every personal computer. The rat-race between virus writers and detectors has led to improved viruses and detection techniques. In recent years, metamorphic malwares have posed serious challenge to anti-virus writers. Current signature based detection techniques, heuristic based techniques are not comprehensive solutions. A formidable solution to detection of metamorphic malware is void. This paper investigates the problem of malware detection, specifically metamorphic malwares. The paper …

Clustering And Validation Of Microarray Data Using Consensus Clustering, Sarbinder Kallar

Master's Projects

Clustering is a popular method to glean useful information from microarray data. Unfortunately the results obtained from the common clustering algorithms are not consistent and even with multiple runs of different algorithms a further validation step is required. Due to absence of well defined class labels, and unknown number of clusters, the unsupervised learning problem of finding optimal clustering is hard. Obtaining a consensus of judiciously obtained clusterings not only provides stable results but also lends a high level of confidence in the quality of results. Several base algorithm runs are used to generate clusterings and a co-association matrix of …

Email Data Mining: An Approach To Construct An Organization Position-Wise Structure While Performing Email Analysis, Bhargav Vadher

Master's Projects

In this age of social networking, it is necessary to define the relationships among the members of a social network. Various techniques are already available to define user- to-user relationships across the network. Over time, many algorithms and machine learning techniques were applied to find relationships over social networks, yet very few techniques and information are available to define a relation directly over raw email data. Few educational societies have developed a way to mine the email log files and have found the inter-relation between the users by means of clusters. Again, there is no solid technique available that can …

Parallel Programming Recipes, Thuy C. Nguyenphuc

Master's Projects

Parallel programming has become vital for the success of commercial applications since Moore’s Law will now be used to double the processors (or cores) per chip every technology generation. The performance of applications depends on how software executions can be mapped on the multi-core chip, and how efficiently they run the cores. Currently, the increase of parallelism in software development is necessary, not only for taking advantage of multi-core capability, but also for adapting and surviving in the new silicon implementation. This project will provide the performance characteristics of parallelism for some common algorithms or computations using different parallel languages. …

How Smart Is Your Android Smartphone?, Deepika Mulani

Master's Projects

Smart phones are ubiquitous today. These phones generally have access to sensitive personal information and, consequently, they are a prime target for attackers. A virus or worm that spreads over the network to cell phone users could be particularly damaging. Due to a rising demand for secure mobile phones, manufacturers have increased their emphasis on mobile security. In this project, we address some security issues relevant to the current Android smartphone framework. Specifically, we demonstrate an exploit that targets the Android telephony service. In addition, as a defense against the loss of personal information, we provide a means to encrypt …

Approximate Disassembly, Dhivyakrishnan Radhakrishnan

Master's Projects

For the past two decades, computer viruses have been a constant security threat. A computer virus is a type of malware that may damage computer systems by destroying data, crashing the system, or through other malicious activity. Among the different types of viruses, metamorphic viruses are one of the most difficult to detect since such viruses change their internal structures with each mutation, making signature-based detection infeasible. Many construction kits are available that can be used to easily generate metamorphic strains of any given virus. Previous work has shown that metamorphic viruses are detectable using Hidden Markov Models (HMM). In …

Detecting Undetectable Computer Viruses, Sujandharan Venkatachalam

Master's Projects

Signature-based detection relies on patterns present in viruses and provides a relatively simple and efficient method for detecting known viruses. At present, most anti-virus systems rely primarily on signature detection. Metamorphic viruses are one of the most difficult types of viruses to detect. Such viruses change their internal structure, which provides an effective means of evading signature detection. Previous work has provided a rigorous proof that a fairly simple metamorphic engine can generate viruses that will evade any signature-based detection. In this project, we first implement a metamorphic engine that is provably undetectable—in the sense of signature-based detection. We then …

Geometrical Structure And Analysis Of Association Rule, Rajat Sar

Master's Projects

Association rule mining helps us to identify the association between items from a large transactional data set. It has always been a time consuming process because of repeatedly scanning of the data set. Apriori Algorithm [1] and FP-Tree Algorithm [2] are the two methods to find out the association of items in a large transactional item set. Both the above algorithm works differently (Apriori follows Bottom-Up Approach & FP-Tree follows Top-Down Approach) in order to get the association. Associations of items generated from the above two algorithms can be represented in geometry. The geometrical form of associations is called Simplical …

Security In Peer-To-Peer Sip Voip, Richa Marwaha

Master's Projects

VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) is one of the fastest growing technologies in the world. It is used by people all over the world for communication. But with the growing popularity of internet, security is one of the biggest concerns. It is important that the intruders are not able to sniff the packets that are transmitted over the internet through VoIP. Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) is the most popular and commonly used protocol of VoIP. Now days, companies like Skype are using Peer-to-Peer SIP VoIP for faster and better performance. Through this project I am improving an already existing Peer-to-Peer …

Spatial And Spatial-Temporal Analysis Of Grizzly Bear Movement Patterns As Related To Underlying Landscapes Across Multiple Scales, Barbara Lynn Carra

Theses and Dissertations (Comprehensive)

Studying the movements of grizzly bears (Ursus arctos) in Alberta is imperative for scientifically informed management practices. To properly balance industry requirements with conservation imperatives, it is necessary to understand the spatial and spatial-temporal movement patterns of grizzly bears as they relate to underlying landscape properties. As part of the Foothills Research Institute Grizzly Bear Research Program, this dissertation explored both fine and largescale movement patterns generated from global positioning system (GPS) radiotelemetry data.

Between 1999 and 2005, grizzly bears were captured and radio-collared across western Alberta. The temporal resolution of GPS data collection had a large impact …

Littoral Cells, Longshore Transport And Wave Climate: An Examination Of Littoral Transport Along The Western Shore Of Prince Edward County, Ontario, Jayson A. Childs

Theses and Dissertations (Comprehensive)

This study discusses the wave climate and potential littoral transport along the western shore of Prince Edward County approximately two hours east of Toronto along the northern shoreline of Lake Ontario. The limestone headlands and barrier bars of the western coast are exposed toward a southwesterly fetch of approximately 200 km that can produce large offshore wave heights of 2–5 m. The wave model STWAVE was used to transform a standard set of wave conditions developed from recent hindcast data to examine fair weather, storm and extreme conditions for five directions between south and west-northwest along the shore. The resulting …

Spawning-Related Movements Of Barred Sand Bass Paralabrax Nebulifer, In Southern California: Interpretations From Two Decades Of Historical Tag And Recapture Data, E. T. Jarvis, Christi Linardich, C. F. Valle

Biological Sciences Faculty Publications

During the 1960s and 1990s, the California Department of Fish and Game tagged 8,634 barred sand bass in southern California, and 972 fish (11%) were recaptured. Tag returns suggest barred sand bass are transient aggregate spawners that form spawning aggregations consisting of both resident and migrant individuals. Spawning residency at a historic spawning location was estimated by the frequency of returns over time; most same-year returns (82%, n  =  141) were recaptured within a 7 to 35-day period. The maximum recapture distance was 92 km. The average (± SD) non-spawning season recapture distance from peak spawning season tagging locations was …