Digital Commons Network^™

Networked Differential Gps Methods, Simon P. Barr

Open Access Master's Theses

Historically, maritime organizations seeking accurate shipboard positioning have relied upon some form of differential GNSS, such as DGPS, WAAS, or EGNOS, to improve the accuracy and integrity of the GPS. Ground-based augmentation systems, such as DGPS, broadcast corrections to the GPS signal from geographically distributed terrestrial reference stations—often called beacons. Specifically, pseudorange corrections to the GPS L1 C/A signal are computed at each reference site, then broadcast in the nearby geographic area using a medium frequency (approximately 300 kHz) communications link. The user then adds these corrections onto their measured pseudoranges before implementing a position solution algorithm. Within the United …

Partner Perception Of Nonverbal Social Skills And Its Impact On Relationship Satisfaction In Dating Couples, Wynston D. Wilson

Open Access Master's Theses

This study examined relational satisfaction and perceptions of the target person’s social skills from the perspective of both members of the relationship. Respondents (N = 177) age 18 to 28 completed the Relationship Assessment Scale and the emotional expressivity, emotional sensitivity, social expressivity, and social sensitivity subscales of the Social Skills Inventory. Participants and partners completed a self-report assessment of her or his own social skills, other-report assessment of her or his partners’ social skills, and the Relationship Assessment Scale. Multiple regression correlations were performed using participant and partner satisfaction as the dependent variables and participant and partner social skills …

Improving Performance Of Data-Parallel Applications On Cpu-Gpu Heterogeneous Systems, Ronald Duarte

Open Access Master's Theses

Using two full applications with different characteristics, this thesis explores the performance and energy efficiency of CUDA-enabled GPUs and multi-core SIMD CPUs. Our implementations efficiently exploit both SIMD and thread-level parallelism on multi-core CPUs and the computational capabilities of CUDA-enabled GPUs. We discuss general optimization techniques and cost comparison for our CPU-only and CPU-GPU platforms. Finally, we present an evaluation of the implementation effort required to efficiently utilize multi-core SIMD CPUs and CUDA-enabled GPUs. One of the applications, seam carving, has been widely used for content-aware resizing of images and videos with little to no perceptible distortion. The gradient kernel …

An Inversion Scheme For Shear Wave Speed Using Scholte Wave Dispersion, Jennifer L. Giard

Open Access Master's Theses

Acoustic propagation in littoral waters is greatly affected by seafloor sediment properties. Shear properties of sediments are also directly related to the strength of sediments for geotechnical applications. These factors emphasize the importance of estimating shear wave speeds in semi-consolidated shallow water sediments. One of the most promising approaches to estimate shear speed is to invert the shear speed profile using the dispersion of seismo-acoustic interface (Scholte) waves that travel along the water-sediment boundary. The propagation speed and attenuation of Scholte waves are closely related to the shear wave speed and attenuation over a depth of 1-2 wavelengths into the …

Relationship Between Small Strain Shear Modulus And Undrained Shear Strength In Direct Simple Shear, Brian A. Baffer

Open Access Master's Theses

Over the past several years, measuring the shear wave velocity (Vs) of soils has become more common for earthquake site response analyses and for estimating soil type and strength to better assist geotechnical engineers in forming more accurate soil profiles for engineering design. Most of the measurements in the laboratory have been conducted in conjunction with triaxial tests due to the larger sample sizes and availability of equipment in the U.S. It is less common to measure the shear wave velocity in the direct simple shear (DSS) apparatus. This is partly because, up until the past decade, there have been …

"Would Live Like Ancient Greeks": The Art And Life Of Raymond Duncan, Megan Martinelli

Open Access Master's Theses

Raymond Duncan, born in San Francisco in 1874, led an intriguing life immersed in artistic and creative endeavors. At his art colonies located in France, he and his followers produced hand-painted silk textiles, garments, and sandals produced at the colonies that drew inspiration from Ancient Greece. Duncan also dressed in classical-inspired attire for sixty-two years. The goal of this study is to reveal Raymond Duncan, an overlooked early twentieth-century leader in artistic textile and garment design with an Ancient Greek aesthetic and his work, to scholars of design, textile and costume history. The two objectives of this research were to …

Experimental And Numerical Study Of A Wave Eneergy Harvesting Buoy, John Montgomery

Open Access Master's Theses

Since 2006, as part of projects funded by the Office of Naval Research (SBIRs and STTRs) and the State of Rhode Island (STAC, RI Alliance), the Department of Ocean Engineering at the University of Rhode Island (OCE) and Electro Standard Laboratories (ESL) have worked on the design, modeling (both computer and laboratory), construction, and testing of a series of small point absorber, multi-directional buoys for wave energy conversion. At full scale, these systems target up to 1kW of power per unit, mostly to power ocean instrumentation systems. Initially 4 design concepts were proposed. From these, two design concepts were selected …

Naxos Music Library Mobile Application [Review], Anne Shelley

Faculty and Staff Publications – Milner Library

This review evaluates a free mobile application provided by the streaming audio database Naxos Music Library.

Establishing Twenty-First-Century Information Fluency, Jennifer Sharkey

Faculty and Staff Publications – Milner Library

In an effort to infuse information fluency into programming and curriculum, consideration of the learning environment and methods for integrating technology is essential.

Surviving Slis: A Guide To Getting Through Library And Information Studies Graduate School, Eric Willey

Faculty and Staff Publications – Milner Library

This is a short book about getting into, getting through, and getting what you can out of library graduate school. Most of it is drawn from my experience in a library and information studies graduate program, some of it from a history graduate program, and the rest from conversations with fellow students, colleagues, and instructors.

Pre-Disclosure Accumulations By Activist Investors: Evidence And Policy, Lucian A. Bebchuk, Alon Brav, Robert J. Jackson Jr., Wei Jiang

Ira M. Millstein Center for Global Markets and Corporate Ownership

The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is currently considering a rulemaking petition requesting that the Commission shorten the ten-day window, established by Section 13(d) of the Williams Act, within which investors must publicly disclose purchases of a five percent or greater stake in public companies. In this Article, we provide the first systematic empirical evidence on these disclosures and find that several of the petition's factual premises are not consistent with the evidence.

Our analysis is based on about 2,000 filings by activist hedge funds during the period of 1994-2007. We find that the data are inconsistent with the petition's …

A Robust Linear Dynamic Positioning Controller For A Marine Surface Vehicle, Thomas P. Derensis

Open Access Master's Theses

The autonomous surface vehicle (ASV) owned by the University of Rhode Island currently uses a PID controller that is insucient for its maneuvering goals. The goal was to develop a robust linear controller based on state space dynamic positioning models that is able to follow a given path with minimal error in the presence of environmental disturbances and model perturbations. A controller was designed for the linear Cybership II model in MATLAB and then tested in Simulink with these disturbances on a nonlinear Cybership II model. The linear controller uses a feedfoward inverse lter to follow a desired elliptical path …

Use Of Reinforcement Learning (Rl) For Plan Generation In Belief-Desire-Intention (Bdi) Agent Systems, Jose L. Feliu

Open Access Master's Theses

The Belief-Desire-Intention (BDI) agent framework is a reactive agent framework based on the idea of intentionality. A known weaknesses of BDI is its lack of learning capabilities resulting from its dependence on an a-priori library of plans. BDI plans are designed by human experts on the domain to which BDI is being applied and are fixed. Any situation the BDI agent encounters which does not have a matching plan can result in erroneous agent operation and even agent failure.

Researchers have augmented the BDI framework with various learning frameworks including decision trees, self-organizing neural networks, hybrid-architectures using low level learners, …

Improving The Efficiency Of Solar Photovoltaic Power System, Henry A. Aribisala

Open Access Master's Theses

As the local and national clamor for foreign energy independent United States continues to grow unabated; renewable energy has been receiving increased focus and it’s widely believed that it’s not only the answer to ever increasing demand for energy in this country, but also the environmentally friendly means of meeting such demand. During the spring of 2010, I was involved with a 5KW solar power system design project; the project involved designing and building solar panels and associated accessories like the solar array mounts and Solar Inverter system. One of the key issues we ran into during the initial stage …

Separating The Effects Of Temperature And Community Composition On The Magnitude Of Heterotrophic Protist Grazing Rates In Narragansett Bay, Samantha C. Decuollo

Open Access Master's Theses

Understanding the relative effects of phytoplankton assemblage and temperature on heterotrophic protist grazing rates remains underdeveloped due to seasonal constraints that result in concurrent changes in both variables. In order to separate effects of temperature and community composition on microherbivory, we used the dilution method to measure grazing rates at in-situ and cooled incubation temperatures conducted in parallel during summer/autumn 2012, in Narragansett Bay, Rhode Island, USA. Chain-forming diatoms dominated the microphytoplankton, whereas aloricate ciliates dominated the microzooplankton. Weekly environmental variability –not primarily characterized by temperature– had a significant effect on phytoplankton-species composition. Initial autotrophic biomass averaged 127 μg C …

Cyclic Resistance - Shear Wave Velocity Relationships For Monterey And Cabo Rojo Carbonate Sand, Michael Lowell Dobling

Open Access Master's Theses

The current state-of-the-practice for estimating the liquefaction potential of a site is to use correlations with the in situ tests such as the Standard Penetration Test (SPT), Cone Penetration Test (CPT), and shear wave velocity (Vs). In each method, field data has been collected from sites where either liquefaction or no liquefaction was observed following earthquakes.

These methods assume that the in situ measurement (SPT, CPT, or Vs) captures the liquefaction resistance of all coarse-grained soils. This has been shown to be true for the SPT and CPT, where resistance is related to the relative density of the soil. In …

Analysis Of University Historic Clothing And Textile Websites, Catherine Murphy

Open Access Master's Theses

Many universities with historic textile and costume collections do not have websites promoting their collections. The websites not only increase awareness about the collections, they also allow the institutions to become worldwide research facilities, while simultaneously promoting the historic textile and costume field.

This study evaluated private and public university historic textile and costume collections in the United States to determine how the websites were constructed and what material was included. Upon completion of website analysis, I contacted specific universities for further study based on how well the websites matched a list of components for a valuable website developed from …

Auras, Adele Ball

Scripps Senior Theses

Auras is a series of illustrations of Carlos Fuentes’s novella, Aura, a horror love story about memory, obsession, desire, corporeality and immortality. Defying narrative conventions, the story is told through second person. You are the protagonist, Felipe Montero, and are employed by a 109-year old widow to edit her husband's memoirs. Inside the pitchblack house, you fall in love with her beautiful and bizarre green-eyed niece, Aura. The gradual discovery of the true relationship between the young woman and her aunt propel the story to its extraordinary conclusion.

The story seems to take place within the confines of the …

The Last Rites Of Public Campaign Financing?, James Sample

Hofstra Law Faculty Scholarship

This Article asserts the current predicament of public campaign financing is this: options that are still on the table under the Court's First Amendment jurisprudence are, with only rare and idiosyncratic exceptions, fiscal and political non-starters. Conversely, options that would be, and indeed previously had been, fiscally and politically viable, are now, even after years of their routine practice in varied jurisdictions, no longer constitutional. It is, in short, simultaneously a legal and practical dilemma. Short of highly unlikely swings of the Supreme Court pendulum, and absent an even more unlikely constitutional amendment, cities, states, and federal government actors, who …

Sunbeam Offers A Ray Of Sunshine For The Licensee When A Licensor Rejects A Trademark License Agreement In Bankruptcy, Alan N. Resnick

Hofstra Law Faculty Scholarship

In 1985, industries that relied heavily on intellectual property licenses were dealt a severe blow when the Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit held that a licensee of patent rights could be deprived of the continued use of patent technology by reason of the licensor rejecting the license in bankruptcy. In Lubrizol Enterprises, Inc. v. Richmond Metal Finishers, Inc., the appellate court characterized a nonexclusive patent license as an executory contract within the meaning of the Bankruptcy Code and approved rejection of the license by the licensor because it was advantageous to the licensor's Chapter 11 reorganization effort. …

Hedonic Trademarks, Irina D. Manta

Hofstra Law Faculty Scholarship

A number of scholars have recently critiqued the traditional search-costs model of trademark infringement doctrine and have proposed alternatives driven by consumer decision-making theories and contractarian understandings of trademarks. While I agree that the search-costs model is problematic in parts, some of the other suggested frameworks suffer from difficulties of their own. For one, these alternative approaches draw up a dichotomy between “pure” experiences of trademarked goods as opposed to “altered” experiences, with the latter representing the mindsets of consumers after trademark owners have influenced them via advertising and other devices in an effort to build up goodwill. This Article …

Prosecution (Is) Complex, Alafair Burke

Hofstra Law Faculty Scholarship

Post-conviction DNA testing has led to the exoneration of nearly three hundred defendants. As the number of exonerations grows, we are in an era where the once unthinkable is now undeniable. We convict the innocent. We imprison the innocent. We place the innocent on death row. Daniel Medwed brings this reality to life in his captivating book, Prosecution Complex, which carefully documents the myriad ways that prosecutors can contribute to wrongful convictions at every stage of a criminal case. From the charging decision to plea bargaining to trial to post-conviction, Medwed argues, prosecutors face an “ongoing schizophrenia” as they seek …

Unprotected Sex: The Pregnancy Discrimination Act At 35, Deborah L. Brake, Joanna L. Grossman

Hofstra Law Faculty Scholarship

Thirty-five years ago, Congress passed the Pregnancy Discrimination Act to overturn a Supreme Court decision refusing to recognize pregnancy discrimination as a form of discrimination based on sex. Now, three and a half decades later, women whose work lives are impacted by pregnancy are again finding themselves unprotected from discrimination. Lower court rulings have eviscerated the Act’s protections at the same time that an expansion of worker rights under the Americans with Disabilities Act should redound to the benefit of pregnant women by expanding the pool of comparators who receive accommodations. By following trends in discrimination law generally - equating …

The Role Of Emotional Intelligence In Sympathizing With Rape Victims, Alexis Barab

Scripps Senior Theses

This study examined the relationships among participants’ emotional intelligence and participants’ sympathy for an alleged rape victim[1], sympathy for a defendant, and verdict in a mock rape case. Participants were 219 (127 female, 92 male) United States jury eligible individuals between the ages of 18 and 66. Participants were given a rape trial summary accompanied by a manipulated emotional facial expression of the alleged rape victim (angry, sad, afraid, or neutral), or no photograph. Participants were asked to render an individual case verdict and complete a questionnaire with measures to test sympathy for the alleged rape victim, sympathy …

Rotor Bar Fault Monitoring Method Based On Analysis Of Air-Gap Torques Of Induction Motors, Aderiano Da Silva, Nabeel Demerdash, Richard J. Povinelli

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Research and Publications

A robust method to monitor the operating conditions of induction motors is presented. This method utilizes the data analysis of the air-gap torque profile in conjunction with a Bayesian classifier to determine the operating condition of an induction motor as either healthy or faulty. This method is trained offline with datasets generated either from an induction motor modeled by a time-stepping finite-element (TSFE) method or experimental data. This method can effectively monitor the operating conditions of induction motors that are different in frame/class, ratings, or design from the motor used in the training stage. Such differences can include the level …

Effect Of Hydrodynamic Force On Microcantilever Vibrations: Applications To Liquid-Phase Chemical Sensing, I. Dufour, E. Lemaire, B. Caillard, H. Debeda, C. Lucat, Stephen M. Heinrich, Fabien Josse, O. Brand

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Research and Publications

At the microscale, cantilever vibrations depend not only on the microstructure’s properties and geometry but also on the properties of the surrounding medium. In fact, when a microcantilever vibrates in a fluid, the fluid offers resistance to the motion of the beam. The study of the influence of the hydrodynamic force on the microcantilever’s vibrational spectrum can be used to either (1) optimize the use of microcantilevers for chemical detection in liquid media or (2) extract the mechanical properties of the fluid. The classical method for application (1) in gas is to operate the microcantilever in the dynamic transverse bending …

Time Resolved Gain And Excess Noise Properties Of Ingaas/Inalas Avalanche Photodiodes With Cascaded Discrete Gain Layer Multiplication Regions, Georges M. Williams, David A. Ramirez, Majeed M. Hayat, Andrew S. Huntington

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Research and Publications

To predict pulse detection performance when implemented in high speed photoreceivers, temporally resolved measurements of a 10-stage InAlAs/InGaAs single carrier multiplication (SCM) avalanche photodiode (APD)'s avalanche response to short multi-photon laser pulses were explained using instantaneous (time resolved) pulse height statistics of the device's impulse response. Numeric models of the junction carrier populations as a function of the time following injection of a primary photo-electron were used to create the probability density functions (pdfs) of the instances of the avalanche buildup process. The numeric pdfs were used to generate low frequency gain and excess noise models, which were in good …

Interactive Concept Acquisition For Embodied Artificial Agents, Joachim De Greeff

School of Engineering, Computing and Mathematics Theses

An important capacity that is still lacking in intelligent systems such as robots, is the ability to use concepts in a human-like manner. Indeed, the use of concepts has been recognised as being fundamental to a wide range of cognitive skills, including classification, reasoning and memory. Intricately intertwined with language, concepts are at the core of human cognition; but despite a large body or research, their functioning is as of yet not well understood. Nevertheless it remains clear that if intelligent systems are to achieve a level of cognition comparable to humans, they will have to posses the ability to …

Antenna Designs For Wireless Medical Implants., Conor P. Conran

Masters

Active medical implants are devices that are surgically implanted inside the body. They have been developed to treat a wide range of ailments and many require some form of communications link with the outside world for maintenance and for remote medical diagnostics. Radio links promise a wide range of benefits over the traditional low frequency inductive coupling method.

Body tissue is a challenging environment, both for the device and for the radio signal that it transmits. Innovation in medical technology is creating a demand for high bandwidth links, and this in turn is driving the development of implantable antennas.

Many …

Microsimulation Evaluation Of Eurocode Load Model For American Long-Span Bridges, Bernard Enright, Colm Carey, Colin Caprani

Articles

The ability to accurately predict traffic loading is essential for cost-effective bridge maintenance and repair programs. The traffic load model currently used in the United States for the design of long-span bridges was developed over three decades ago. In the meantime vehicle characteristics and traffic patterns have changed. The Eurocode for traffic loading is more recent, but was calibrated only for bridges up to 200 m long. In this work, Weigh-In-Motion traffic records from 11 different sites across Alabama are used to establish congested traffic loading. Traffic microsimulation is used to generate the congestion, based on the real traffic data. …