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2011

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Phylogeographic Structure Of Teretrius Nigrescens (Coleoptera: Histeridae) Predator Of The Invasive Post Harvest Pest Prostephanus Truncatus (Coleoptera: Bostrichidae)., B. A. Omondi, J. Van Den Berg, D. Masiga, F. Schulthess Jan 2011

Phylogeographic Structure Of Teretrius Nigrescens (Coleoptera: Histeridae) Predator Of The Invasive Post Harvest Pest Prostephanus Truncatus (Coleoptera: Bostrichidae)., B. A. Omondi, J. Van Den Berg, D. Masiga, F. Schulthess

All Peer-Reviewed Publications

The invasive larger grain borer Prostephanus truncatus (Horn) is the most important pest of farm-stored maize in Africa. It was introduced into the continent from Mesoamerica in the late 1970s and by 2008 had spread to at least 18 countries. Classical biological control using two populations of the predator Teretrius nigrescens Lewis achieved long-term and cost effective control in warm-humid areas, but not in cool and hot-dry zones. The present study investigated the phylogenetic relationships between geographical populations of the predator. Ten populations of T. nigrescens were studied using randomly amplified polymorphic DNA polymerase chain reaction (RAPD-PCR), sequence analysis of …

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Improving Service Through Just-In-Time Concept In A Dynamic Operational Environment, Kar Way Tan, Hoong Chuin Lau, Na Fu Jan 2011

Improving Service Through Just-In-Time Concept In A Dynamic Operational Environment, Kar Way Tan, Hoong Chuin Lau, Na Fu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This paper is concerned with the problem of Just-In-Time (JIT) job scheduling in a dynamic environment under uncertainty to attain timely service. We provide an approach, based on robust scheduling concepts, to analytically evaluate the expected cost of earliness and tardiness for each job and also the project. In addition, we search for a schedule execution policy with the minimum robust cost such that for a given risk level (epsilon), the actual realized schedule has (1 - epsilon) probability of completing with less than or equal to this robust cost. Our method is quite generic, and can be applied to …

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Lightweight Delegated Subset Test With Privacy Protection, Xuhua Zhou, Xuhua Ding, Kefei Chen Jan 2011

Lightweight Delegated Subset Test With Privacy Protection, Xuhua Zhou, Xuhua Ding, Kefei Chen

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Delegated subset tests are mandatory in many applications, such as content-based networks and outsourced text retrieval, where an untrusted server evaluates the degree of matching between two data sets. We design a novel scheme to protect the privacy of the data sets in comparison against the untrusted server, with half of the computation cost and half of the ciphertext size of existing solutions based on predicate only encryption supporting inner product.

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Would Price Limits Have Made Any Difference To The 'Flash Crash' On May 6, 2010, Wing Bernard Lee, Shih-Fen Cheng, Annie Koh Jan 2011

Would Price Limits Have Made Any Difference To The 'Flash Crash' On May 6, 2010, Wing Bernard Lee, Shih-Fen Cheng, Annie Koh

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

On May 6, 2010, the U.S. equity markets experienced a brief but highly unusual drop in prices across a number of stocks and indices. The Dow Jones Industrial Average (see Figure 1) fell by approximately 9% in a matter of minutes, and several stocks were traded down sharply before recovering a short time later. The authors contend that the events of May 6, 2010 exhibit patterns consistent with the type of "flash crash" observed in their earlier study (2010). This paper describes the results of nine different simulations created by using a large-scale computer model to reconstruct the critical elements …

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Maintaining And Enhancing The Integrity Of Adr Processes: From Principles To Practice Through People, Kellam, Nadja Alexander, Nadja Marie Alexander, Andrew Bickerdike, Andrew Greenwood, Margaret Halsmith, Norah Hartnett, Ian Hanger Hanger, Tom Howe, Elizabeth Kelly, Stephen Lancken, Gaye Sculthorpe, Lindsay Smith, Warwick Soden, Tania Sourdin Jan 2011

Maintaining And Enhancing The Integrity Of Adr Processes: From Principles To Practice Through People, Kellam, Nadja Alexander, Nadja Marie Alexander, Andrew Bickerdike, Andrew Greenwood, Margaret Halsmith, Norah Hartnett, Ian Hanger Hanger, Tom Howe, Elizabeth Kelly, Stephen Lancken, Gaye Sculthorpe, Lindsay Smith, Warwick Soden, Tania Sourdin

Research Collection Yong Pung How School Of Law

Nadja Alexander was contributor to the Report as council member of National Alternative Dispute Resolution Advisory Council.In this Report, the National Alternative Dispute Resolution Advisory Council (NADRAC) canvasses particular issues that support the integrity of alternative dispute resolution (ADR) processes, and that are identified in the Terms of Reference. These are: conduct obligations, rules about confidentiality and inadmissibility of communications within ADR processes, and immunity of ADR practitioners from being sued. The Report explains NADRAC’s understanding of the breadth of the concept of integrity as it applies to ADR processes, canvasses the views of interested parties about the integrity of …

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Randomly Projected Kd-Trees With Distance Metric Learning For Image Retrieval, Pengcheng Wu, Steven Hoi, Duc Dung Nguyen, Ying He Jan 2011

Randomly Projected Kd-Trees With Distance Metric Learning For Image Retrieval, Pengcheng Wu, Steven Hoi, Duc Dung Nguyen, Ying He

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Efficient nearest neighbor (NN) search techniques for highdimensional data are crucial to content-based image retrieval (CBIR). Traditional data structures (e.g., kd-tree) usually are only efficient for low dimensional data, but often perform no better than a simple exhaustive linear search when the number of dimensions is large enough. Recently, approximate NN search techniques have been proposed for high-dimensional search, such as Locality-Sensitive Hashing (LSH), which adopts some random projection approach. Motivated by similar idea, in this paper, we propose a new high dimensional NN search method, called Randomly Projected kd-Trees (RP-kd-Trees), which is to project data points into a lower-dimensional …

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Payroll Taxes, Wealth And Employment In Neoclassical Theory: Neutrality Or Nonneutrality?, Hian Teck Hoon Jan 2011

Payroll Taxes, Wealth And Employment In Neoclassical Theory: Neutrality Or Nonneutrality?, Hian Teck Hoon

Research Collection School Of Economics

The theoretical proposition that temporarily below-normal tax rates on labor this year, when merged with the prospect of reversion to normal rates next year, will encourage households to squeeze more work into this year and to work less in future years is well-founded. This proposition was recently tested anew on Icelandic data and performed well empirically (Bianchi, Gudmundsson, and Zoega 2001). But would a permanent cut in tax rates on labor encourage more work permanently—with no diminution of effectiveness? Conversely, does a permanent increase in tax rates on labor cause a permanent decline in hours worked?

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Monetary Policy In Singapore And The Global Financial Crisis, Hwee Kwan Chow, Peter Wilson Jan 2011

Monetary Policy In Singapore And The Global Financial Crisis, Hwee Kwan Chow, Peter Wilson

Research Collection School Of Economics

Prior to the crisis the consensus amongst central bankers in advanced economies was that price stability, in the form of low and stable price inflation, was a top priority for monetary policy and could best be achieved by targeting interest rates (usually overnight) or monetary aggregates, such as Narrow Money (M1) and Broad Money (M2). Liquidity in the banking system could be flexibly adjusted on a daily basis through open market operations to increase or decrease the monetary base which would be transmitted to the rest of the economy through financial intermediation. Financial markets would then adjust longer-term interest rates …

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Nmr Study Of Borohydrides For Hydrogen Storage Applications, David Shane Jan 2011

Nmr Study Of Borohydrides For Hydrogen Storage Applications, David Shane

All Theses and Dissertations (ETDs)

There is great interest today in developing a hydrogen economy, and hydrogen powered vehicles to replace vehicles powered by fossil fuels. This presents many challenges for researchers, and one of the biggest is developing materials that could be used to store the hydrogen on-vehicle. We used nuclear magnetic resonance to study the atomic motions in many hydrogen storage materials, including sodium magnesium hydride, lithium borohydride, and magnesium borohydride. We also examined the effects of nanoscaffold incorporation on the latter two materials.

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Processing Speed And Executive Abilities In Children With Phenylketonuria, Alicia Janos Jan 2011

Processing Speed And Executive Abilities In Children With Phenylketonuria, Alicia Janos

All Theses and Dissertations (ETDs)

Objective: Phenylketonuria: PKU) is a hereditary metabolic disorder that often results in neuropsychological impairment, even in individuals treated early and continuously. This study was conducted to examine processing speed, variability in processing speed, and the relationship between processing speed variables and executive abilities in children with early- and continuously-treated PKU. Method: Participants were 42 children with PKU and 81 typically-developing children ranging from 7 to 18 years of age. Children completed three computerized reaction time: RT) tasks: simple reaction time, go/no-go, stimulus-response compatibility) and seven tasks assessing various aspects of executive abilities: working memory, inhibitory control, strategic processing). Results: The …

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Three Essays In Macroeconomics, Kyoung Jin Choi Jan 2011

Three Essays In Macroeconomics, Kyoung Jin Choi

All Theses and Dissertations (ETDs)

The scope of the dissertation is: broadly-defined) general macroeconomics. The first essay is on optimal taxation and capital structure, the second essay is on firm dynamics, and the third essay is on financial crises. The first essay clarifies the role of the corporate income tax: as a form of double taxation) for achieving socially optimal allocations in the Mirrlees framework when the government cannot tax unrealized capital income at the individual level. Use of the corporate tax requires changes in the individual capital tax. The novelty of the paper is that the sophisticated tax system is designed to influence the …

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Well-Defined Molecular Brushes: Synthesis By A "Grafting Through" Strategy And Self Assembly Into Complicated Hierarchical Nanostructures, Zhou Li Jan 2011

Well-Defined Molecular Brushes: Synthesis By A "Grafting Through" Strategy And Self Assembly Into Complicated Hierarchical Nanostructures, Zhou Li

All Theses and Dissertations (ETDs)

This dissertation focuses on the development of a "grafting through" methodology to synthesize molecular brushes with well-defined structures, as an attempt to construct nanostructures by covalent bonds totally. Detailed synthetic procedures for and characterization of molecular brushes, as well as complicated hierarchical nanostructures resulted from their self-assembly are reported. The synthesis of molecular brushes is achieved by combining orthogonal living polymerization techniques rationally, such as living/controlled radical polymerization, ring opening polymerization and ring opening metathesis polymerization. Generally, the strategy can be divided into two steps: the first step involves the preparation of linear macromonomers whose chain ends are functionalized with …

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Erst War Es Immer, Und Dann War Es Nicht. Speed And The Poetics Of Movement In Rainer Maria Rilke's Neue Gedichte, Erika Kontulainen Jan 2011

Erst War Es Immer, Und Dann War Es Nicht. Speed And The Poetics Of Movement In Rainer Maria Rilke's Neue Gedichte, Erika Kontulainen

All Theses and Dissertations (ETDs)

No abstract provided.

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Identification Of The Molecular Basis Of Morphological Variation In Avian Beaks, Kara Powder Jan 2011

Identification Of The Molecular Basis Of Morphological Variation In Avian Beaks, Kara Powder

All Theses and Dissertations (ETDs)

Vertebrates, particularly birds, show extremely variable species-specific morphology in craniofacial structures. Cranial neural crest cells give rise to all the cartilage and bone of the face, and transplantation experiments have shown that these cells contain species-specific patterning information. First, I employed custom cross-species microarrays to analyze the spectrum of developmental signaling pathway and transcription factor gene expression changes in neural crest cells of the developing beaks for the chicken, duck, and quail, both before and after morphological variation is evident. I found that neural crest cells have established a species-specific gene expression profile that predates morphological variation. In addition to …

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Using Visual Feedback To Guide Movement: Properties Of Adaptation In Changing Environments And Parkinson's Disease, Jennifer Semrau Jan 2011

Using Visual Feedback To Guide Movement: Properties Of Adaptation In Changing Environments And Parkinson's Disease, Jennifer Semrau

All Theses and Dissertations (ETDs)

On a day-to-day basis we use visual information to guide the execution of our movements with great ease. The use of vision allows us to guide and modify our movements by appropriately transforming external sensory information into proper motor commands. Current literature characterizes the process of visuomotor adaptation, but fails to consider the incremental response to sensed errors that comprise a fully adaptive process. We aimed to understand the properties of the trial-by-trial transformation of sensed visual error into subsequent motor adaptation. In this thesis we further aimed to understand how visuomotor learning changes as a function of experienced environment …

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Betting On Tort Suits After The Event: From Champerty To Insurance, Anthony J. Sebok Jan 2011

Betting On Tort Suits After The Event: From Champerty To Insurance, Anthony J. Sebok

Articles

The article challenges the notion that champerty, a form of third-party litigation funding, is a form of gambling. It argues that champerty serves a functional purpose similar to insurance by transferring risk, thereby providing a legitimate form of "after the event" insurance for plaintiffs. The author, Anthony Sebok, contends that while champerty involves contingent outcomes, it should be recognized for its role in risk management rather than being dismissed as speculative gambling.

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Guardianship For Persons With Mental Illness - A Legal And Appropriate Alternative?, Leslie Salzman Jan 2011

Guardianship For Persons With Mental Illness - A Legal And Appropriate Alternative?, Leslie Salzman

Articles

The article critiques the U.S. guardianship system for individuals with psychosocial disabilities, arguing that it often unnecessarily restricts their autonomy by removing their legal right to make decisions. It advocates for supported decision-making models as a less restrictive alternative, aligning with the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD). The analysis emphasizes the importance of maximizing integration and participation in social, economic, and civic life, while highlighting the need for safeguards to ensure effective support without undue bureaucratic complexity.

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Reviving Slander, Cristina Carmody Tilley Jan 2011

Reviving Slander, Cristina Carmody Tilley

Faculty Publications

Roman law treated differently speech restricted to small, closed communities and speech within or among large, permeable communities. Intracommunity speech was subject to unlimited tort consequences, while intercommunity speech was subject to central government regulation. As English speech law evolved, slander rules governing spoken speech became a convenient proxy for intracommunity speech regulation, while libel rules governing written speech became a convenient proxy for intercommunity speech. In American law, the conceptual collapse of slander and libel meant that constitutional limits designed to lift central government regulation of intercommunity speech perhaps inadvertently vitiated tort consequences for intracommunity speech. The Supreme Court's …

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Empirical Studies For Reliable Home Area Wireless Sensor Networks, Mo Sha Jan 2011

Empirical Studies For Reliable Home Area Wireless Sensor Networks, Mo Sha

All Theses and Dissertations (ETDs)

Home Area Networks: HANs) consisting of wireless sensors have emerged as the enabling technology for important applications such as smart energy and assisted living. A key challenge faced by HANs is maintaining reliable operation in real-world residential environments. In this thesis research, empirical studies on the spectrum usage in the 2.4 GHz band as well as 802.15.4 wireless channels are performed in diversified real residential environments. Based on the insights drawn from empirical studies, network design guideline and practical solution for Home Area Sensor Network are provided.

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Studies In Magnetism And Superconductivity Under Extreme Pressure, Wenli Bi Jan 2011

Studies In Magnetism And Superconductivity Under Extreme Pressure, Wenli Bi

All Theses and Dissertations (ETDs)

Abstract Studies of superconductivity, magnetism and structure under pressure have made important contributions to furthering our understanding of the physical properties of materials. High pressure can change the superconducting transition temperature, create new superconductors, change the magnetic state of a material, and induce structural transitions. In Eu metal the strong local-moment magnetism in divalent Eu: 4f7) suppresses superconductivity. Under sufficiently high pressure, Eu is expected to become trivalent and nonmagnetic: 4f6). Recently, superconductivity in Eu was discovered by Debessai et al. for pressures above 80 GPa. However, Eu's transition temperature lies near 2 K, nearly an order of magnitude lower …

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Optimal Control For Autonomous Motor Behavior, Tom Erez Jan 2011

Optimal Control For Autonomous Motor Behavior, Tom Erez

All Theses and Dissertations (ETDs)

This dissertation presents algorithms that allow robots to generate optimal behavior from first principles. Instead of hard-coding every desired behavior, we encode the task as a cost function, and use numerical optimization to find action sequences that can accomplish the task. Using the theoretical framework of optimal control, we develop methods for generating autonomous motor behavior in high-dimensional domains of legged locomotion. We identify three foundational problems that limit the application of existing optimal control algorithms, and present guiding principles that address these issues. First, some traditional algorithms use global optimization, where every possible state is considered. This approach cannot …

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Relational Selves In Eighteenth-Century Literature, Kate Parker Jan 2011

Relational Selves In Eighteenth-Century Literature, Kate Parker

All Theses and Dissertations (ETDs)

We imagine the eighteenth century to be the time when modern individuals constituted themselves against the forces of communal obligation, when marriage emerged as a union based on singular affection, and when heterosexuality cohered as an ideology. But Relational Selves in Eighteenth Century Literature argues that a libertine logic of communal attraction, spontaneous affiliation, and transitory affection remains central to the literary production of modern selfhood in the eighteenth century. It thus departs from well-established critical narratives that entwine the modern self with the eighteenth-century emergence of sexual complementarity, the companionate marriage, and bourgeois individualism. I show instead how eighteenth-century …

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Dramaturgical Crossroads And Aesthetic Transformations: Modern And Contemporary Adaptations Of Classical Japanese Nō Drama, Robert Neblett Jan 2011

Dramaturgical Crossroads And Aesthetic Transformations: Modern And Contemporary Adaptations Of Classical Japanese Nō Drama, Robert Neblett

All Theses and Dissertations (ETDs)

This study explores the various dramaturgical strategies at work within the twentieth and twenty-first-century theatrical adaptation of the Japanese Nō drama. At its core are questions regarding the methodology utilized in the updating of an innately supernatural and spiritual aesthetic into the increasingly secularized world of the present, and how those supernatural elements are often transformed into metaphorical constructs. Ultimately, I examine how the transformative aesthetic that has given the Nō its literary power over the past 700 years is the very aspect that permits it to facilitate, resist, and assimilate the strategies of dramatic adaptation. My primary categories for …

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Essays On Margin Requirements, Endogenous Illiquidity, And Portfolio Choice, Yajun Wang Jan 2011

Essays On Margin Requirements, Endogenous Illiquidity, And Portfolio Choice, Yajun Wang

All Theses and Dissertations (ETDs)

This dissertation includes three essays. The first essay studies the effects of margin requirements. The second essay studies how asymmetric information and imperfect competition affect equilibrium illiquidity. The third essay derives new comparative statics results for the distribution of portfolio payoffs. Margin requirements have long been implemented in almost all financial markets and are often used as an important regulatory tool for improving market conditions. However, their economic impact beyond affecting default risk is still largely unknown. The first essay proposes a tractable and flexible equilibrium model with and without information asymmetry to examine how margin requirements on both long …

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Essays On Microeconomics With Incomplete Information, Jie Zheng Jan 2011

Essays On Microeconomics With Incomplete Information, Jie Zheng

All Theses and Dissertations (ETDs)

My dissertation devotes to the understanding of people's interactions under uncertainty.. It contains four essays on Microeconomics with Incomplete Information. Chapter 1 focuses on the existence of rational bubbles in an Allen-Morris-Postlewaite: 1993) setting, and finds positive and negative results for bubbles in an asset market featuring rational expectations equilibrium. An expected bubble is said to exist if it is mutual knowledge that the price of the asset is higher than the expected dividend. Similarly we call it a strong bubble if everyone knows that the price is higher than the maximum possible dividend. Substituting common knowledge for mutual knowledge, …

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This Loquacious Soil: Language And Religious Experience In Early America, Natalie Spar Jan 2011

This Loquacious Soil: Language And Religious Experience In Early America, Natalie Spar

All Theses and Dissertations (ETDs)

This dissertation argues that early American religious leaders and lay people developed philosophically complex linguistic theories as a result of a critically under-explored tension between text and religious experience. I investigate the inner workings of this dilemma across early American genres of religious experience--sermons, tracts, letters, diaries, ethnographies, and trials. Reading the plain style sermons of John Cotton, Thomas Shepard, and Thomas Hooker, Anne Hutchinson's trial, seventeenth-century Quaker language tracts, ethnographic and missionary texts about the seventeenth-century Native Americans, and the Great Awakening diaries edited by Jonathan Edwards I argue that while originating in an immaterial experience of the invisible …

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Design, Construction And Testing Of A High Temperature High Pressure Spectroscopic Cell For Polymer Physics Studies, Sai Janani Ganesan Jan 2011

Design, Construction And Testing Of A High Temperature High Pressure Spectroscopic Cell For Polymer Physics Studies, Sai Janani Ganesan

All Theses and Dissertations (ETDs)

Knowledge of phase behaviour of polymer solutions is critical in understanding their chemical and physical properties. Proteins are polymers and aggregation is a phase separation process, hence there is a need for the use of techniques from polymer physics to characterize phase diagrams. Prior work on protein aggregation indicates the need for superheated water to disaggregate the system, accordingly this report proposes a simple, efficient, and reliable instrument for experimentally determining cloud-point curves for binary polymer-solvent systems. Cloud-point measurements are a prominent technique in constructing phase diagrams. A one milliliter optical cell has been designed and constructed, to withstand 200 …

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Decoding Brain Activation From Ipsilateral Cortex Using Ecog Signals In Humans, Yuzong Liu Jan 2011

Decoding Brain Activation From Ipsilateral Cortex Using Ecog Signals In Humans, Yuzong Liu

All Theses and Dissertations (ETDs)

Today, learning from the brain is the most challenging issue in many areas. Neural scientists, computer scientists, and engineers are collaborating in this broad research area. With better techniques, we can extract the brain signals by either non-invasive approach such as EEG: electroencephalography), fMRI, or invasive method such as ECoG: electrocorticography), FP: field potential) and signals from single unit. The challenge is, given the brain signals, how can we possibly decipher them? Brain Computer Interfaces, or BCIs, aim at utilizing the brain signals to control prothetic arms or operate devices. Previously almost all the research on BCIs focuses on decoding …

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Towards The Borderlands: An Investigation Into The Works Of Yi Yang-Ji, Michael Toole Jan 2011

Towards The Borderlands: An Investigation Into The Works Of Yi Yang-Ji, Michael Toole

All Theses and Dissertations (ETDs)

No abstract provided.

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Speling "Successful" Sucesfuly: Statistical Learning In Spelling, Siti Syuhada Binte Faizal Jan 2011

Speling "Successful" Sucesfuly: Statistical Learning In Spelling, Siti Syuhada Binte Faizal

All Theses and Dissertations (ETDs)

Many spelling errors in English are doubling errors, as when people are stumped by the double ‹l› in ‹trellis›. In Study 1, we tabulated statistical patterns with regards to doubling in English. In Study 2, we collected behavioral data to see if people were sensitive to these statistical patterns in doubling and to explore other factors that might influence doubling such as context, individual differences: language background and spelling ability), and task. We gave two nonword spelling tasks to US college students: N=68) and bilingual Singaporean college students from an English-based education system but with diverse language backgrounds: Mandarin: N=54), …

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