Digital Commons Network^™

I Searched For Louis Vuitton And All I Got Was This Lousy Knockoff: Exploring The Initial Interest Confusion Doctrine In Trademark Infringement Cases Related To Search Engine Keyword Advertisements, Alyssa E. Baute

University of Dayton Law Review

No abstract provided.

Man Vs. Nature: Should The Offspring Of Transgenic Animals Be Patentable Subject Matter?, Renee T. Wilkerson

University of Dayton Law Review

No abstract provided.

High-Throughput Sperm Cryopreservation Of Aquatic Species, E Hu

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

The goal of this dissertation was to integrate multiple disciplines for application of high-throughput sperm cryopreservation to aquatic species. The blue catfish Ictalurus furcatus was selected for research due to its role in production of hybrid catfish with eggs from channel catfish Ictalurus punctatus. A high-throughput cryopreservation pathway was developed by systematically evaluating each process factor and using automated processing systems. Large quantities of cryopreserved sperm produced from this protocol were evaluated in commercial-scale hatcheries in cooperation with aquaculture producers. To develop production for commercial requirements, quality characteristics of materials and products were identified and recorded during processing and analyzed …

Effect Of Surfactants And Brine Salinity And Composition On Spreading, Wettability And Flow Behavior In Gas-Condensate Reservoirs, Yu Zheng

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

The well-known condensate blockage problem causes severe impairment of gas productivity as the flowing bottom-hole pressure falls below the dew point in gas-condensate reservoirs. Hence, this study attempts to investigate the concept of modifying the spreading coefficient and wettability using low-cost surfactants in the near wellbore region, to prevent the gas flow problems associated with condensate buildup. This study also examines the effect of brine salinity and composition on wettability, spreading and adhesion in condensate buildup regions, to evaluate the ability of brine salinity/composition for enhanced gas productivity in gas-condensate reservoirs. In this study, experiments were performed at both ambient …

Improved Speech Intelligibility With A Chimaera Hearing Aid Algorithm, Andrew Hines, Naomi Harte

Conference papers

It is recognised that current hearing aid fitting algorithms can corrupt fine timing cues in speech. This paper presents a fitting algorithm that aims to improve speech intelligibility, while preserving the temporal fine structure. The algorithm combines the signal envelope amplification from a standard hearing aid fitting algorithm with the fine timing information available to unaided listeners. The proposed “chimaera aid” is evaluated with computer simulated listener tests to measure its speech intelligibility for 3 sample hearing losses. In addition, the experiment demonstrates the potential application of auditory nerve models in the development of new hearing aid algorithm designs using …

Visqol: The Virtual Speech Quality Objective Listener, Andrew Hines, Jan Skoglund, Anil Kokaram, Naomi Harte

Conference papers

A model of human speech quality perception has been developed to provide an objective measure for predicting subjective quality assessments. The Virtual Speech Quality Objective Listener (ViSQOL) model is a signal based full reference metric that uses a spectro-temporal measure of similarity between a reference and a test speech signal. This paper describes the algorithm and compares the results with PESQ for common problems in VoIP: clock drift, associated time warping and jitter. The results indicate that ViSQOL is less prone to underestimation of speech quality in both scenarios than the ITU standard.

The Importance Of Human Mental Workload In Web Design, Luca Longo, Fabio Rusconi, Lucia Noce, Stephen Barrett

Conference papers

The focus of this study is the introduction of the construct of Human Mental Workload (HMW) in Web design, aimed at supporting current interaction design practices. An experiment has been conducted using the original Wikipedia and Google web-interfaces, and using two slightly different versions. Three subjective psychological mental workload assessment techniques (NASA-TLX, Workload Profile and SWAT) with a well-established assessments usability tool (SUS) have been adopted. T-tests have been performed to study the statistical significance of the original and modified web-pages, in terms of workload required by typical tasks and perceived usability. Preliminary results show that, in one ideal case, …

Amd&Art: Performativity And Participation In Ecological Remediation, Travis Paine Brisini

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

In this study, I examine and theorize AMD&ART, an artwork devoted to treating polluted water in Vintondale, PA. AMD&ART is much more than simply a water treatment facility, however. Each chapter of this document examines AMD&ART through the lens of a different body of scholarly literature: the literature associated with land art, Systems Theory, Network Theory, Companion Specieshood and others. The theoretical focus of this paper is the emergent importance of the concept of performativity—“that reiterative power of discourse to produce the phenomena that it regulates and constrains” (Butler, Bodies 2)—in the deconstruction of the binary division of “nature” and …

Conformance Testing Of Peer-To-Peer Systems Using Message Traffic Analysis, John Wesley Burris

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Peer-to-Peer architectures are used by a large number of distributed systems; however, the challenges such as maintaining a reliable and stable peer-to-peer network can make such networks undesirable for distributed systems. Peer-to-peer architectures are designed to be executed on systems with diverse hardware configurations, distant geographic locations, and varied, unpredictable Internet connectivity that make the software testing process difficult. This research defines a method for conformance testing peer-to-peer content distribution systems called “Method for Conformance Testing by Analyzing Message Activity” (MCTAMA). MCTAMA uses a common representation for describing the behavior of nodes during both design and deployment. ATAMA generates, evaluates …

Factors Affecting Short-Term Oxygen Variability In The Northern Gulf Of Mexico Hypoxic Zone, Brenda Leroux Babin

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Open-water continuous monitoring of DO concentrations at a single station (C6) in the Gulf of Mexico from 1989 to 2008 afforded an excellent opportunity to characterize short-term oxygen variability and to estimate the relative importance of key physical and biological factors controlling the development, persistence, and dissipation of hypoxia. I investigated temporal trends in three aspects of short-term DO variability: respiration rates (i.e., how quickly bottom waters become hypoxic), persistence of hypoxia, and the dissipation of hypoxia (i.e., re-aeration events). I identified the range of respiration rates present at the study site, and showed how these rates vary throughout the …

Geometrical And Electronic Structure Of Metal Oxide Nanoparticles On Silica And Alumina, Udaya Indike Rodrigo

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Recent studies demonstrated nanometer-scale combustion-generated nanoparticles cause demonstrable health effects. It is essential to understand the chemical characteristics of these nanoparticles. Since combustion-generated nanoparticles arise in complex mixtures, we employed a dendrimeric method to generate simpler, more reproducible nanoparticles, which were tethered to fumed silica and alumina to provide surrogates for fly ash. We collected XANES and EXAFS data, which are useful for characterizing disordered mixtures where the metal is a minor component. The effect of particle size on structural properties was studied with copper oxide nanoparticles on fumed silica. XANES data demonstrated copper atoms in the nanoparticles are present …

Stereoscopic Avatar Interfaces : A Study To Determine What Effect, If Any, 3d Technology Has At Increasing The Interpretability Of An Avatar's Gaze Into The Real-World, Mark Dunne, Brian Mac Namee, John D. Kelleher

Conference papers

An approach to displaying avatar interfaces monoscopically such as the Turning, Stretching and Boxing (TSB) technique (a combination of three graphical processes) has been shown to improve the communication efficiency of avatars by increasing a user's ability to interpret an avatar's gaze direction through the delivery of a sustained 3D illusion of the avatar on a standard 2D display. A reasonable question to ask about this approach is whether or not the improvement in interpretability can be matched or surpassed by using a standard 3D display technology (stereoscopic) with or without the fore-mentioned approach? This paper presents an experiment that …

Software Architectural Support For Tangible User Interfaces In Distributed, Heterogeneous Computing Environments, Cornelius Toole

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This research focuses on tools that support the development of tangible interaction-based applications for distributed computing environments. Applications built with these tools are capable of utilizing heterogeneous resources for tangible interaction and can be reconfigured for different contexts with minimal code changes. Current trends in computing, especially in areas such as computational science, scientific visualization and computer supported collaborative work, foreshadow increasing complexity, distribution and remoteness of computation and data. These trends imply that tangible interface developers must address concerns of both tangible interaction design and networked distributed computing. In this dissertation, we present a software architecture that supports separation …

A Posthuman Curriculum: Subjectivity At The Crossroads Of Time, Brad M. Petitfils

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This investigation is focused on three critical issues facing educators in the 21st century: how technology is reshaping what it means to be human, the shift from the human era to the posthuman era and the implications of that shift on subjectivity, and the purpose of undergraduate education in a posthuman era. The current shift towards a posthuman worldview is a radical break from the modern and postmodern 20th century, when identity was constructed in terms of possibilities and multiplicities. Instead, in the hyperreal 21st century, subjectivity is complicated by homogenization and the radical sameness of simulated technological experiences. Also, …

Public-Sector Employment Under Siege, Stephen F. Befort

Articles

This article was prepared for a symposium at Indiana University Maurer School of Law on Labor and Employment Law under the Obama Administration. The article analyzes the current spate of attacks on public employees with particular reference to three sub-topics: teacher tenure and evaluation “reform,” the periodic cycles of public sector fiscal crises, and the unilateral modification of public sector collective bargaining agreements. The article concludes with the assessment that cyclical attacks on public sector workers reflect a skewed viewpoint that public employees owe first-class obligations but possess only second-class rights.

Human Engineering, Dusty Austin

Architecture Theses

This thesis focuses on the question: how might ergonomics and universal design improve the human experience in the work environment? The typology for this examination is a research and development facility. The project’s location is in West Fargo next to the current Caterpillar manufacturing facility. Human Engineering facility is a research and development complex that is spanning 14,000sqf.

Evaluating Speedup In Parallel Compilers, Deepa V. Komathukattil

UNF Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Parallel programming is prevalent in every field mainly to speed up computation. Advancements in multiprocessor technology fuel this trend toward parallel programming. However, modern compilers are still largely single threaded and do not take advantage of the machine resources available to them. There has been a lot of work done on compilers that add parallel constructs to the programs they are compiling, enabling programs to exploit parallelism at run time. Auto parallelization of loops by a compiler is one such example. Researchers have done very little work towards parallelizing the compilation process itself.

The research done here focuses on parallel …

All-Sky Search For Periodic Gravitational Waves In The Full S5 Ligo Data, J. Abadie, Marco Cavaglia, For Full List Of Authors, See Publisher's Website.

Physics Faculty Research & Creative Works

We report on an all-sky search for periodic gravitational waves in the frequency band 50-800Hz and with the frequency time derivative in the range of 0 through -6 x 10^-9Hz/s. Such a signal could be produced by a nearby spinning and slightly nonaxisymmetric isolated neutron star in our Galaxy. After recent improvements in the search program that yielded a 10x increase in computational efficiency, we have searched in two years of data collected during LIGO's fifth science run and have obtained the most sensitive all-sky upper limits on gravitational-wave strain to date. Near 150Hz our upper limit on …

Predictive Modeling For Navigating Social Media, Meiqun Hu

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

Social media changes the way people use the Web. It has transformed ordinary Web users from information consumers to content contributors. One popular form of content contribution is social tagging, in which users assign tags to Web resources. By the collective efforts of the social tagging community, a new information space has been created for information navigation. Navigation allows serendipitous discovery of information by examining the information objects linked to one another in the social tagging space. In this dissertation, we study prediction tasks that facilitate navigation in social tagging systems. For social tagging systems to meet complex navigation needs …

Robust Execution Strategy For Scheduling Under Uncertainity, Na Fu

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

Resource Constrained Project Scheduling Problems with minimum and maximum time lags (RCPSP/max) provides a general model for resource scheduling in many real-world problems (such as manufacturing and construction engineering). Due to its practical importance and generality, providing effective algorithms and scalable solutions for RCPSP/max is a topic of growing research. Traditional methods have addressed deterministic models with all parameters known with certainty. In this thesis, we are concerned with RCPSP/max problems in an uncertain environment where durations of activities are stochastic and resource availabilities are subject to unforeseen breakdowns. We propose methods for generating robust execution strategy to protect against …

Novel Techniques Of Using Diversity In Software Security And Information Hiding, Jin Han

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

Diversity is an important and valuable concept that has been adopted in many fields to reduce correlated risks and to increase survivability. In information security, diversity also helps to increase both defense capability and fault tolerance for information systems and communication networks, where diversity can be adopted from many different perspectives. This dissertation, in particular, focuses mainly on two aspects of diversity – the application software diversity and the diversity in data interpretation. Software diversity has many advantages over mono-culture in improving system security. A number of previous researches focused on utilizing existing off-theshelf diverse software for network protection and …

Go Niche Or Go Home: Influence Maximization In The Presence Of Strong Opponent, Long Foong Liow

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

In hotly contested product categories dominated by a few powerful firms, it is quite common for weaker or late entrants to focus only on particular segments of the whole market. The rationale for such strategy is intuitive: to avoid direct confrontation with heavy-weight firms, and to concentrate in segments where these weaker firms have comparative advantages. In marketing, this is what people called “go niche or go home”. The niche-building strategy may rely on “homophily”, which implies that consumers in a particular market segment might possess certain set of attributes that cause them to appreciate certain products better (in other …

Effective Dielectric Constant Of Two Phase Systems, Vladimir Petrovsky, Piotr Z. Jasinski, Fatih Dogan

Materials Science and Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

Theoretical approaches to electrical characterization of two phase systems are mostly limited to the systems where the individual components exhibit the same type of conductivity (pure dielectric or pure conductive systems). In this article, the brick wall geometry is extended to the mixed conductive systems with percolation. Impedance spectroscopy techniques were used for experimental investigation of slurries. Various metal oxide powders and host liquids were analyzed using a wide range of solids loadings. Comparison of experimental results with theoretical predictions shows good fitting of the experimental data. Parameters (the values of permittivity for both phases and percolation threshold) calculated from …

Deposition Of Cerium-Based Conversion Coatings On Aluminum Alloy 380, Ci Lin, Surender Maddela, William Fahrenholtz, Matthew O'Keefe

Materials Science and Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

Cerium-based conversion coatings were deposited on as-cast aluminum alloy 380 substrates by a spontaneous immersion process. In this study, the effects of rinsing temperature prior to immersion in the coating deposition solution were studied with respect to the surface morphology, electrochemical response, and corrosion resistance of the coatings. Panels rinsed at 25 degrees celsius prior to coating had large cracks and holes in the coating. In contrast, panels rinsed at 100 degrees celsius prior to coating had a uniform coating morphology with fewer, smaller cracks. Electrochemical testing revealed that coatings deposited on substrates rinsed at 100 degrees celsius had higher …

Taking It All Off: Salazar V. Butterball And The Battle Over Fair Compensation Under The Flsa's Changing Clothes Provision, Amanda Walck

Denver Law Review

No abstract provided.

The Audacity Of Ignoring Hope: How The Existing Qualified Immunity Analysis Leads To Unremedied Rights, Aaron Belzer

Denver Law Review

No abstract provided.

Awad V. Ziriax: The Tenth Circuit's Defense Against The Power Of Religious Majority Factions, Renee Sheeder

Denver Law Review

No abstract provided.

Directional Anisotropy In The Mechanical Behavior Of Friction Stir Processed And Aged Az91 Alloy, Vipin Jain, Wei Yuan, R. S. Mishra, Gouthama, Anil K. Gupta

Materials Science and Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

Friction stir processing (FSP) is an emerging grain refinement technique for magnesium alloys. in this study, a cast AZ91 alloy was processed by a single-pass FSP to achieve an average grain size of ∼6 μm in the nugget zone. the FSP is found to introduce texture in the alloy due to preferred alignment of basal poles in the processing direction. the mechanical behavior is significantly influenced by texture. after FSP, the alloy was aged at different temperatures and times for continuous and discontinuous precipitation of β-Mg17Al12. a high anisotropy in yield stress is observed in the processing and transverse direction …

Equivalent Circuit Model Of Coaxial Probes For Patch Antennas, Y. S. Hu, Yanzhi Zhang, Jun Fan

Mathematics and Statistics Faculty Research & Creative Works

An equivalent circuit model of coaxial probes is derived directly from the intrinsic via circuit model. as all the higher-order evanescent modes have been included analytically in the parasitic circuit elements, only the propagating mode needs to be considered by the simplest uniform-current model of a coaxial probe in numerical solvers such as -nite element method (FEM) or -nite divergence time domain (FDTD). This avoids dense meshes or sub-gridding techniques and greatly reduces the computational efforts for accurate calculation of the probe input impedance. the derived equivalent circuit model and the new feeding technique have been validated by both analytical …

X-Ray Emission Cross Sections Following Charge Exchange Collisions On Neutral Targets: The Role Of Multiple Electron Capture, Sebastian Otranto, Ronald E. Olson

Physics Faculty Research & Creative Works

Line emission and charge exchange cross sections obtained from a three-active electrons CTMC code allow us to determine the role of multiple electron capture for charge exchange collisions on neutral argon and neon. the present results can be compared to recent experimental data from EBIT groups operating at Liver-more, NIST and Berlin.