Digital Commons Network^™

Research Developments (No.24) Summer 2010

Research Developments

Table of Contents for this issue: (a) Exploring mathematical competencies; (b) Success against the odds;(c) Getting students involved; (d) New secondary diploma to meet students' workplace needs.

Cs Review, 2010-12, Civil Service Senate

CS Review

A publication of the Civil Service Senate for Civil Service employees at Governors State University.

Gsu View, 2010-12, Office Of Public Affairs

GSU View

Newsletter published by Governors State University 2007-current.

Go! Green Outreach, Winter 2010, University Of Arkansas, Fayetteville. Division Of University Advancement

Go! Green Outreach

"Sharing sustainability news, efforts, and ideas with the people of campus" --cover image

Amazon's Clout: World's Largest Online Retailer Joins The Cloud Computing Camp, Knowledge@Smu

Knowledge@SMU

Many organisations invest heavily in information technology, acquiring the best IT equipment, backup for the best IT equipment, and hiring highly skilled and reputable IT consultants and vendors. While a great IT infrastructure will be critical to business success, its escalating costs have become somewhat prohibitive, thanks, in part, to a vicious lock-in cycle that handcuffs organisations to heavy machines. Enter cloud computing – a new paradigm in IT management that slashes capital expenditure and operating costs. Amazon.com, which runs the world's largest online retail store on a cloud, believes that cloud computing is the way forward for the connected …

Automation Of Pillow Speaker Button Testing To Avoid Repetitive Strain Injuries In Testing Technicians, Tyler P. Finnegan

Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering

Abstract Anacom MedTek, a medical device company, produces pillow speakers as their main product line. Pillow speakers are a healthcare communications tool that allow for hospital patients to control many entertainment and environmental components of the hospital room from one controller. These pillow speaker devices have anywhere from 3 to 27 metal dome key cap buttons based on their customization. Before they can be shipped to a customer, each button must be tested to ensure that it is functioning properly. This test is currently done manually by a testing technician. With so many buttons to be tested for each unit …

Use Of Wireline Logs To Estimate Strength Of Cap-Rock Lithologies, Elizabeth S. Petrie, James P. Evans

Graduate Student Posters

The characterization of rock strength for cap rock, low-permeability and high capillary entry pressure, lithologies is important for modeling their response to increased fluid pressures in CO2 sequestration schemes and other geo-engineering operations such as waste disposal and recovery of fluids from plays with insufficient permeability. We investigate Mesozoic fine-grained sequences to evaluate the nature of sedimentological and structural processes that may control the nature of brittle deformation observed in these sequences. To characterize these fine-grained sequences we use a combination of data obtained from outcrop, including fracture orientation and density, lithologic stacking patterns, grain-size distributions and mineralogy to predict …

Rock Properties And Internal Structure Of The San Andreas Fault Near ~ 3 Km Depth In The Safod Borehole Based On Meso- To Micro-Scale Analyses Of Phase Iii Whole Rock Core, Kelly Keighley Bradbury, James P. Evans

Geosciences Presentations

We examine the relationships between rock properties and structure within ~ 41 m of PHASE III whole-rock core collected from ~ 3 km depth along the SAF in the San Andreas Fault Observatory at Depth (SAFOD) borehole, near Parkfield, CA.

Efficacy Of The United States Safe Harbor Framework, Margaret M. Beck

Regis University Student Publications (comprehensive collection)

This study assessed the efficacy of the United States Safe Harbor Framework by approximating the size of a population of large United States organizations (50,000 - 500,000 employees) that were eligible to participate in the Safe Harbor that did not participate. The Safe Harbor Framework, administered by the United States Department of Commerce, is a voluntary program that assists United States organizations in complying with the European Union Data Privacy Directive. Out of a population of 337 large organizations, 168 were potentially eligible to participate in the Safe Harbor Framework. One hundred and ten, or 66%, of these organizations did …

The John Muir Newsletter, Winter 2010/2011, The John Muir Center

Muir Center Newsletters (1981-2015)

Page 1 transcription missing

PAGE 2 John Muir Back and Newsletter Going Digital After a year, we are back! Last year we announced that we would become an "occasional" newsletter, projecting two issues per year. We only released one issue this past year. In an age of high cost of reproduction and mailing we have decided to follow the trail of other newsletters by going digital. Those with e mail can continue to receive at no charge the newsletter as part of a web serve list. Simply e mail us at [email protected] and we will include you in our future …

The Surge: General Petraeus And The Turnaround In Iraq, William A. Knowlton , Jr.

NDU Case Studies

When General David H. Petraeus, USA, took command of Multi-National Force–Iraq (MNF–I) on February 10, 2007, beginning his 3d tour and 28th month in Iraq, the situation was grim. Increasing sectarian violence had led to an escalation of killings of civilians in Iraq, with up to 150 corpses being found daily in Baghdad.1 The government of Prime Minister Nouri alMaliki was viewed by almost everyone as ineffective at best, and the U.S. military strategy was not well defined and clearly not working. Iraq appeared to be sliding out of control toward civil war or disintegration, and the United States appeared …

The Chat Room, Vol. 18 (December 2010), College Of Education And Professional Studies

The Chat Room (CEPS Newsletter)

The Chat Room is the College of Education and Professional Studies newsletter. This is Volume 18, December 2010.

A Study Of The Characteristics Of Female Delinquent Youth Within The Virginia Department Of Juvenile Justice, Stephanie Meehan

Theses & Honors Papers

No abstract provided.

The Bonded Labor System In Nepal: Exploring Halia And Kamaiya Children’S Life-Worlds, Birendra R. Giri

HIMALAYA, the Journal of the Association for Nepal and Himalayan Studies

Nepal is believed to have thousands of bonded laborers under the so-called haliya and kamaiya systems. The latter was outlawed in 2000 and the former in 2008, following a widespread campaign by local organisations, including the bonded laborers themselves. While state intervention has reportedly discouraged adults from forging an annual haliya or kamaiya contract, even the so-called “systematic rehabilitation” of “freed” kamaiya families has not been entirely successful in offering long-term livelihood alternatives. As a result, patchy reports suggest that children are increasingly taking the jobs done by their parents or elders. This study, which focuses on Musahar and Tharu …

The Tarai: A Part Of Moghlan Or Gorkha? Perspectives From The Time Of The Anglo- Gorkha War (1814-1816), Bernardo Michael

HIMALAYA, the Journal of the Association for Nepal and Himalayan Studies

The Tarai has always been considered an integral part of the modern Nepali state. However, the status of this important stretch of territory was open to ambiguity and flux in much of the period prior to the Anglo-Gorkha War of 1814-1816. A host of petty hill principalities and little kingdoms, further south in Moghlan (the plains of North India below the foothills of the Himalayas) constantly competed to control these lands and their resources. Furthermore, a web of tenurial, taxation, and hierarchical political relationships knitted the lands of the tarai to those of Moghlan. For the rulers of the emerging …

Family Security Insurance: A New Foundation For Economic Security, Workplace Flexibility 2010, Georgetown University Law Center, Berkeley Center On Health, Economic & Family Security, Uc Berkeley School Of Law

Published Reports

A report released by Georgetown Law's Workplace Flexibility 2010 and the Berkeley Center on Health, Economic & Family Security (Berkeley CHEFS) outlining a blueprint for establishing and financing a new national insurance program to provide wage replacement for time off for health and caregiving needs. The report describes the need among working Americans for time off from work to address personal illness, to care for a new child, or to care for a loved one with a serious illness. It argues that the need for time off is no longer an issue for individual families or select industries, but a …

Making A Case For Arts Administrators: Maintaining Interdisciplinary Arts Programs In Public Schools, Samantha Jardon-Peppard

Graduate Theses

For decades interdisciplinary arts programs have been developed and implemented in public schools throughout our nation. Much research has been dedicated to proving the benefits of interdisciplinary arts education, results of which can be found in reports such as Champions of Change and Project Zero. However, little research has been dedicated to how an interdisciplinary arts program is maintained in a school once it has been initiated and who is responsible for its development and sustainability. Chapter one of this thesis reviews some history of arts education, why the arts have become a vital part of education, and how arts …

Developing Alphabetic Knowledge In A School-To-Home Project With Students Who Are At-Risk: Literature Review, Julie Ann Armstrong

Early and Special Education Graduate Projects and Theses

Literacy skills are developing in children from the time they are born and should be nurtured during the preschool years (Joint Position Statement, 2005). There are important literacy skill sets for children to acquire to be competent readers. The 2009 National Early Literacy Panel has defined one of these skills as alphabetic knowledge (Bell & Westberg, 2009). Alphabetic knowledge is being able to recognize and name letters and their sounds. The research shows that mastery of alphabetic skills is required before children can engage successfully in phonemic awareness. (Bara, Gentaz & Cole, 2007). Parents can facilitate their child’s mastery of …

Reference Priors For Exponential Families With Increasing Dimension, Bertrand Clarke, Subhashis Ghosal

Department of Statistics: Faculty Publications

In this article, we establish the asymptotic normality of the posterior distribution for the natural parameter in an exponential family based on independent and identically distributed data. The mode of convergence is expected Kullback-Leibler distance and the number of parameters p is increasing with the sample size n. Using this, we give an asymptotic expansion of the Shannon mutual information valid when p = pm increases at a sufficiently slow rate. The second term in the asymptotic expansion is the largest term that depends on the prior and can be optimized to give Jeffrey's prior as the reference prior in …

Machiguenga Mobilization In The Peruvian Amazon: An Analysis Of Comaru As An Effective Change Agent, Casey Shannon Harrington

Geography Capstone Projects

COMARU (Consejo Machiguenga del Río Urubamba) is an indigenous organization that promotes the rights of thirty native Amazonian communities in the face of the Camisea Project, a massive natural gas extraction project. The state has consistently ignored negative health, environmental, and cultural impacts from five spills that have occurred in the natural gas pipeline, and the communities the right of consultation granted to them in the International Labor Organization’s Convention 169. This paper, using interviews with Machiguenga community members and COMARU leadership in addition to political ecology scholarship, analyzes the success of COMARU’s politicized and depoliticized strategies. Through the use …

Civilization And Competition: Study Societies And State Formation In Late Qing China, Hon-Fai Chen

Global Asia Journal

The institutional platforms that supported activist intellectuals seeking to inaugurate political and cultural modernity through the formation of study societies (xuehui) proliferated throughout the late Qing China (ca. 1895-1911). While existing studies either subsume this distinctive phenomenon under the political programs of reform and revolutionary movements or conceive it as a kind of the prototypical formation of civil society and the public sphere in late Qing China, they seldom question the meanings and functions of ‘civilization,” “society” and “civility” as the constitutive and highly contested notions underlying the cultural and political practices of these study societies. This paper argues that …

Parking Management For Silicon Valley–A Guide For Planners, Decision Makers, And The General Public, Tracy Wang

Master's Theses

The crisis of climate change has jumpstarted a renewed interest in environmental sustainability. The growing awareness of the problem and the ensuing intense search for solutions called for a scrutinizing reexamination of the relationships between transportation, land use, and greenhouse gas emissions. Major publications such as The High Cost of Free Parking by Donald Shoup in 2005, and Parking Management, Strategies, Evaluation and Planning by Todd Litman in 2008, have identified parking as a crucial link. Parking issues are intrinsic to planning because parking facilities are a major land use type that affects how we design and build our commercial …

Easterner, Vol. 62, No. 10, December 1, 2010, Associated Students Of Eastern Washington University

Student Newspapers

This issue of the Easterner contains articles about proposed budget cuts, police escorts to provide safety for students, Pence Union Building (PUB) remodel planning, scholarships, new Board of Trustees members, police opinions of counter protesters to the Westboro Baptist Church demonstration, a faculty art exhibit, fighting in hockey, and the football team's championship run.

Analysis Of A Database Insider Threat Model, Andrea Samuel

Computer Science and Computer Engineering Undergraduate Honors Theses

According to Silicon.com's CIO Insight - Beware the Insider Security Threat, insiders are bigger threats to corporate security than external threats such as denial of service attacks or malware. Statistics show that 70% of fraud is perpetrated by staff and that the main data security threat comes from poorly trained or disgruntled employees who are authorized to have access to data and file stores [4]. This research project focuses specifically on the problem of insider threat in relational database systems. The project involves simulating research conducted in Qussai Yaseen and Brajendra Panda's research paper, Predicting and Preventing Insider Threat in …

Summary Report Of The Mainecare Listening Sessions, Anush Yousefian Hansen Ms,Ma, Katherine Rosingana, Nadine Edris Msw

Disability & Aging

In September of 2010, the Muskie School of Public Service conducted four Listening Sessions with MaineCare members to gather in-depth information about their experiences on MaineCare, their likes and dislikes, and suggestions, needs and wants for improving the program. The overall goal of these sessions was to provide rich information to help inform DHHS in their design of a new managed care initiative. Funding for this project was provided by the Maine Health Access Foundation (MeHAF).

The Burden Of Motherhood: The Effect Of Reproductive Load On Female Lizard Locomotor, Foraging, And Social Behavior, Michele A. Johnson, J. L. Caton, R. E. Cohen, J. R. Vandecar, J. Wade

Biology Faculty Research

The costs of reproduction, involving demands associated with both current and future reproductive efforts, may place a substantial burden on females. However, animals may minimize these costs by modifying their behavior across the reproductive cycle. We examined the effects of reproductive load on three types of behavior (locomotion, foraging, and social displays) in green anole lizards (Anolis carolinensis) by comparing egg, follicle, and oviduct mass and volume with field observational data. We found that female locomotor and social display behaviors decreased as reproductive load increased, suggesting behavioral modification in these traits, but we detected no relationship between foraging and …

Testing Shock Absorbers: Towards A Faster Parallelizable Algorithm, Christian Servin

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

Cars are equipped with shock absorbers, which are designed to smooth out the shocks on the road. In practice, there is a need to test them. To test the shock absorbers, we need to estimate the values of the shock absorber's parameters. If we did not have any measurement errors, then two measurements would be sufficient to determine the parameters. However, in reality, there are measurement errors. Usually, in engineering practice, it is assumed that the errors are normally distributed with 0 mean, so we can use least squares method to test it. In practice, we often only know the …

Fundamental Physical Equations Can Be Derived By Applying Fuzzy Methodology To Informal Physical Ideas, Eric Gutierrez, Vladik Kreinovich

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

Fuzzy methodology transforms expert ideas -- formulated in terms of words from natural language -- into precise rules and formulas. In this paper, we show that by applying this methodology to intuitive physical ideas, we can get fundamental physical equations. This fact provides an additional justification for the fuzzy methodology.

Reducing Over-Conservative Expert Failure Rate Estimates In The Presence Of Limited Data: A New Probabilistic/Fuzzy Approach, Carlos M. Ferregut, F. Joshua Campos, Vladik Kreinovich

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

Unique highly reliable components are typical for aerospace industry. For such components, due to their high reliability and uniqueness, we do not have enough empirical data to make statistically reliable estimates about their failure rate. To overcome this limitation, the empirical data is usually supplemented with expert estimates for the failure rate. The problem is that experts tend to be -- especially in aerospace industry -- over-cautious, over-conservative; their estimates for the failure rate are usually much higher than the actual observed failure rate. In this paper, we provide a new fuzzy-related statistically justified approach for reducing this over-estimation.

Adding Constraints -- A (Seemingly Counterintuitive But) Useful Heuristic In Solving Difficult Problems, Olga Kosheleva, Martine Ceberio, Vladik Kreinovich

Departmental Technical Reports (CS)

Intuitively, the more constraints we impose on a problem, the more difficult it is to solve it. However, in practice, difficult-to-solve problems sometimes get solved when we impose additional constraints and thus, make the problems seemingly more complex. In this methodological paper, we explain this seemingly counter-intuitive phenomenon, and we show that, dues to this explanation, additional constraints can serve as a useful heuristic in solving difficult problems.