Digital Commons Network^™

Resilient Digital Image Watermarking For Document Authentication, Jonathan Blackledge, Oleksandr Iakovenko

Articles

Abstract—We consider the applications of the Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) and then a Chirp coding method for producing a highly robust system for watermarking images using a block partitioning approach subject to a self-alignment strategy and bit error correction. The applications for the algorithms presented and the system developed include the copyright protection of images and Digital Right Management for image libraries, for example. However, the principal focus of the research reported in this paper is on the use of printscan and e-display-scan image authentication for use in e-tickets where QR code, for example, are embedded in a full colour …

Publication And Language Trends Of References In Spanish And Latin American Literature, David S. Nolen

Publications

This study examined references found in three journals in the field of Spanish and Latin American literary studies. Few previous studies have examined types of publishers producing highly cited/referenced books. The data indicate that the primary publishers of scholarly monographs referenced in the journals are U.S. university presses, foreign academic trade presses, and foreign popular trade presses. U.S. university presses, foreign academic trade presses, and government entities published most of the volumes of collected essays referenced. Scholarly monographs published outside the U.S. represented the largest proportions of references, with large growth in references to volumes of collected essays published in …

An Algorithm To Estimate Unsteady And Quasi-Steady Pressure Fields From Velocity Field Measurements, John O. Dabiri, Sanjeeb Bose, Brad J. Gemmell, Sean Colin, John H. Costello

Arts & Sciences Faculty Publications

We describe and characterize a method for estimating the pressure field corresponding to velocity field measurements such as those obtained by using particle image velocimetry. The pressure gradient is estimated from a time series of velocity fields for unsteady calculations or from a single velocity field for quasi-steady calculations. The corresponding pressure field is determined based on median polling of several integration paths through the pressure gradient field in order to reduce the effect of measurement errors that accumulate along individual integration paths. Integration paths are restricted to the nodes of the measured velocity field, thereby eliminating the need for …

Speculative Accumulation: Property-Making In The Brazilian Amazon, Jeremy M. Campbell

Arts & Sciences Faculty Publications

This article explores how nonindigenous settlers in the Brazilian Amazon pursue vernacular territorial strategies as they attempt to make property legible and legitimate in an emerging order of state-led governance reforms. In Amazonia, official figurations for the development of the region have layered upon one another over the past 50 years, depositing a range of contradictory procedures for claiming, holding, and disposing of property. Ethnography shows how residents draw on the ambiguous history of property-making and their deep familiarity with surrounding landscapes to influence new environmental governance paradigms. With the goal of appearing in line with state-led tenure reform, colonists …

Evaluating Evidence Of Childhood Abuse As A Function Of Expert Testimony, Judge’S Instructions, And Sentence Recommendation, Judith Platania, Fotine Konstantopoulou

Arts & Sciences Faculty Publications

In the current study we examined how jurors utilize evidence of childhood abuse as a function of expert testimony and sentence recommendation. We also varied the specificity of instructional language in the context of mitigating circumstances. We predicted jurors who impose a life sentence would rate evidence of childhood abuse as significantly more important in determining sentence compared to jurors who impose the death penalty. Furthermore, we expected this effect to be moderated by expert testimony. Testimony of childhood abuse increased importance ratings of non-statutory mitigating circumstances. This effect was more evident for jurors who imposed a life sentence compared …

The Benefit Of A Clergy Union To The United Church Of Canada, Margaret J. Perry

Theses and Dissertations (Comprehensive)

This thesis was was motivated by the question of the effect of the union

organizing efforts of some of the clergy in the United Church of Canada. The topics of work, call and covenant/contract are examined in a secondary, qualitative manner to establish the way in which they affect the relationship between clergy and the various levels of the church. The work of philosophers, such as Hannah Arendt and sociologists, such as Richard Sennett, as well as theologians Martin Luther, Jean Calvin, John Wesley, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Abraham Heschel, and Walter Brueggemann are included in the study. A Biblical understanding of …

Surface Complexation Of Monosubstituted Organoarsenicals On Hematite: Atr-Ftir Investigations, Md Abdus Sabur

Theses and Dissertations (Comprehensive)

Little is known about the surface chemistry of organoarsenic compounds with iron-containing materials commonly found in geosorbents and arsenic removal technologies. In this thesis, these organoarsenicals include aliphatic and aromatic arsenicals that historically have been used as herbicides, pesticides and in the poultry feed industry, respectively. Attenuated total internal reflectance Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy has been used to study the surface interactions of organoarsenicals at the molecular level under various environmentally-relevant conditions. Kinetic and thermodynamic parameters extracted from these molecular level experiments provide trends that are not observed in any published bulk experiments. Apparent initial rates of adsorption and desorption …

A Computational Study Of Small Gold Clusters With H2s, Thiols, H2o, And Alcohols, Silvija C. Smith

Theses and Dissertations (Comprehensive)

Alkane thiols, RSH, are commonly used in aqueous solution to stabilize and prevent aggregation of gold clusters, Au_n. Initially a RSH-Au_n complex is formed and, subsequently, there is hydrogen atom transfer to form a RSAu_nH complex. We examine the rate of this reaction for small neutral gold clusters, with n=1-2 and short-chain thiols with R = H, CH₃, and CH₃CH₂, using transition state theory. The comparison of DFT (with the functionals, BP86 and M06-2X), and MP2 was performed. A pseudopotential was employed to account for the large relativisitic effects …

Time, Perspectives, Verbs, And Imagining Events, Jeffrey P. Hong

Theses and Dissertations (Comprehensive)

During the processing of verbs, readers form internal representations of the events described by those verbs. Two key elements in the construction of event representations are temporal information, given by the verbs that describe the represented events, and the visual perspective from which the events are represented. The current study is composed of two experiments aimed at examining the roles these two factors play in event representation. Specifically, the study aimed to determine how temporal information and visual perspective are represented during event imagination.

Experiment 1 investigated the role of temporal information associated with verbs, given by grammatical aspect (GA) …

Integrated Spatial Analysis Of Volunteered Geographic Information, Haydn Lawrence

Theses and Dissertations (Comprehensive)

Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) is becoming a pervasive form of data within geographic academic research. VGI offers a relatively new form of data, one with both potential as a sensitive way to collect information about the world, and challenges associated with unknown and heterogeneous data quality. The lack of sampling control, variable expertise in data collection and handling, and limited control over data sources are significant research challenges. In this thesis, data quality of VGI is tackled as a general composite measure based on coverage of the dataset, the evenness in the density of data, and the relative evenness in …

Juror Perceptions Of Eyewitness Identification Evidence, Timothy G. Wykes

Theses and Dissertations (Comprehensive)

Jurors rely on eyewitness testimony in deciding a defendant’s guilt or innocence. Archival analyses of hundreds of post-conviction DNA exonerations have identified eyewitness misidentification as the highest individual factor contributing to wrongful convictions (Innocence Project, 2014). Internationally, criminal justice systems have employed procedural safeguards (PSs) to educate juries on factors affecting eyewitness identification accuracy. Two such safeguards include the introduction of eyewitness expert testimony during trial proceedings and the reading of cautionary instructions by a presiding judge. In an independent factorial design, this research sought to examine the effects of a model judicial caution drafted by the Ontario Judicial Council …

Youth Recidivism: A Qualitative Study Of Risk And Resilience, Jesse M. Near Ms.

Theses and Dissertations (Comprehensive)

Abstract

The rates of reoffending for Ontario youth are high and come at a significant cost to both society and the youths involved. Research to date has explored risk and protective factors. Despite this progress, the relationships between these factors and recidivism are not well understood. Knowing that a youth is exposed to any of these identified risk or protective factors does little to explain why these factors do not affect all youth equally and why some youths reoffend while others do not. Resilience theory has increasingly been used as the framework to explore the concept of recidivism. The present …

A Microgenetic Approach To Examining Set For Variability: An Exploration Of Early Reading Development, Phil R. Cave M.A.

Theses and Dissertations (Comprehensive)

Learning sight words is a process that involves forming connections between letters and their sounds in order to connect spellings of words with their pronunciations as well as their meanings. During the development of sight word reading, children will sound out (phonologically recode) words that they do not yet know by sight (Share, 1995). Because English lacks transparency, sounding out according to grapheme-phoneme correspondences often only results in an approximation to the target word. The process by which a child must match a word they have recoded phonologically with a word that exists in their vocabulary has been referred to …

Physical Fitness Characteristics Of An Active Firefighter Population Serving An Urban Area, Michael R. Antolini

Theses and Dissertations (Comprehensive)

Firefighters require a high level of physical fitness in order to meet the demands of their profession. While physical fitness testing is required to join the department, firefighters are not subject to further formal exercise testing throughout the duration of their careers. Active, career firefighters were tested on a variety of physical fitness measures related to body composition, strength, power, and endurance over three testing sessions. 49 firefighters (40.5 ± 8.3 yr, 89.5 ± 13.0 kg, 27.8 ± 3.6 kg/m2) were found to have a resting heart rate of 57.7 ± 8.2 bpm, blood pressure of 121.5 ± 11.9/71.5 ± …

A Review Of Psychometric Data Analysis And Applications In Modelling Of Academic Achievement In Tertiary Education, Geraldine Gray, Colm Mcguinness, Philip Owende, Aiden Carthy

Articles

Increasing college participation rates, and diversity in student population, is posing a challenge to colleges in their attempts to facilitate learners achieve their full academic potential. Learning analytics is an evolving discipline with capability for educational data analysis that could enable better understanding of learning process, and therefore mitigate these challenges. The outcome from such data analysis will be dependent on the range, type, and quality of available data and the type of analysis performed. This study reviewed factors that could be used to predict academic performance, but which are currently not systematically measured in tertiary education. It focused on …

Turbo Equalization For Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (Mimo) Wireless Communication Systems, Longbao Wang

Doctoral Dissertations

"This dissertation investigates both of the frequency domain and time domain turbo equalization with multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) fading channels for radio frequency and underwater acoustic communications. First, a low complexity frequency domain turbo equalization (FDTE) is proposed for the MIMO systems with zero padding (ZP) or cyclic prefix (CP) inserted between the transmitted data blocks and its performance is tested on the real-world UWA communications experiments.

Second, as high speed communication system requires efficient bandwidth usage and power consumption, CP or ZP is not transmitted as auxiliary information. An inter-block interference cancelation and CP reconstruction algorithm is developed to re-arrange …

Emission Source Microscopy For Electromagnetic Interference Source Localization, Pratik Rajesh Maheshwari

Doctoral Dissertations

"For complex and large systems with multiple sources, it is often difficult to localize the sources of radiation. Near-field electromagnetic scanning is used often for root-cause diagnosis by determining field distribution close to the PCB. In the near-field, the evanescent waves are dominant, which may lead to the misinterpretation of them being the dominant sources contributing to the far-field. Another limitation of near-field scanning is that the probe may not be able to access all locations near the PCB due to the complex geometry and high component density. Two-dimensional synthetic aperture radar is a well-known technique used for antenna diagnostic …

Thermophysical Properties Of Reaction Processed Zirconium Diboride, Jason Michael Lonergan

Doctoral Dissertations

"This dissertation focuses on the thermophysical properties of high purity zirconium diboride ceramics. These ceramics have shown promise for potential applications such as leading edge materials for next generation hypersonic vehicles. The overall goal of this work was to improve the understanding of the thermal properties and maximize the thermal conductivity of ZrB₂. Four main areas were investigated in this work. First, the sintering kinetics and the intrinsic thermal properties of reaction processed ZrB₂ were studied and compared to ZrB₂ produced by hot pressing commercial powders. The reaction process produced ceramics with higher thermal conductivity and …

Proactive Search: Using Outcome-Based Dynamic Nearest-Neighbor Recommendation Algorithms To Improve Search Engine Efficacy, Christopher Shaun Wagner

Doctoral Dissertations

"The explosion of readily available electronic information has changed the focus of data processing from data generation to data discovery. The prevalent use of search engines has generated extensive research into improving the speed and accuracy of searches. The goal of this research is to accurately predict user behavior as a means to proactively improve speed, accuracy, and predictability of search engines. The proactive approach eliminates query entry time and hence reduces the overall processing time, improving speed. Assuming success, the user locates an electronic resource of interest, improving accuracy.

Algorithms that have been shown to predict many vastly different …

Personal Selling: A Humanist Perspective, William R. Gruver, Timothy W. Sweeney

AMTP Proceedings 2014

Association of Marketing Theory and Practice Proceedings 2014,

Illinois State University Annuitants Association Newsletter, Winter 2014, Illinois State University, Annuitants Association

ISUAA News

Illinois State University Annuitants Association newsletter

The Political Foundations Of Miranda V. Arizona And The Quarles Public Safety Exception, Aaron J. Ley, Gordie Verhovek

Political Science Faculty Publications

When Dzhokhar Tsernaev was taken into custody after the Boston Marathon bombing, the Obama Administration’s Justice Department moved to invoke the Quarles Public Safety Exception rather than inform the accused of his rights. A widespread debate about the utility of informing all suspects of their Miranda rights ensued. In this article, we use the Congressional Record to examine the political foundations of the Miranda rule, the Congressional response to Miranda, and the development of the Public Safety Exception announced in Quarles v. New York. We argue that, prior to the Miranda decision, there was widespread and robust political debate in …

Help Wanted: American Drone Program Needs Multifaceted Support To Be Effective, S. Hall

Journal of Strategic Security

The U.S. drone program in Pakistan faces strong resistance in Pakistan. Because the program solely seeks to eliminate terrorist groups and leaders through bombing campaigns, with no built in social support, the local population’s anti-American sentiment has reached the highest level in history. This angry mood against U.S. drone programs is spreading throughout the Islamic world. To counter this anti-American sentiment, and increase the drone program’s effectiveness, the U.S. must invest in multifaceted, socio-economic support efforts to educate the population and rebuild the gratuity, trust, and commitment of Pakistan’s people to the “War on Terror.”

Fighting To The End: The Pakistan Army’S Way Of War. By C. Christine Fair. New York, Ny: Oxford University Press, 2014., Mark Roberts

Journal of Strategic Security

No abstract provided.

Getting Started With Research " Beginning: Defining A Research Question And Preparing A Research Plan, Jacinta Browne

Articles

Research is the lifeblood of medicine with innovations being made in the different technologies used to diagnose and / or screen for the presence of disease or to deliver treatments with higher efficacy. Scientific publication is the network of vessels which delivers the lifeblood. The outputs of research provides us with tomorrows medicine. In this series of articles we will be discussing the different aspects of carrying out research from the conception of the research idea to publication in a peer reviewed journal with the cycle repeating again with new research ideas emerging from the research conducted.

Getting Started With Research " Writing-Up The Results Of Your Research", Jacinta Browne

Articles

This paper gives an overview of the considerations and practical aspects of writing-up the results of your research which may be of interest to those beginning their research career or simply carrying out a research project for the first time as part of an academic qualification. It outlines practical steps for both writing-up the results of your research as an academic report and thereafter disseminating your results more widely as a peer-reviewed scientific publication.

Getting Started With Research "Carrying Out Your Research Project", Jacinta Browne

Articles

This paper gives an overview of the considerations and practical aspects of carrying out a research project which may be of use to those beginning their research career or simply carrying out a research project for the first time as part of an academic qualification. It outlines practical steps for consideration in the day to day management of a research project and highlights areas which require particular consideration for a project to be completed successfully.

An Audit Of A Hospital-Based Doppler Ultrasound Quality Control Protocol Using A Commercial String Doppler Phantom, S. Cournane, Andrew Fagan, Jacinta Browne

Articles

Results from a four-year audit of a Doppler quality assurance (QA) program using a commercially available Doppler string phantom are presented. The suitability of the phantom was firstly determined and modifications were made to improve the reliability and quality of the measurements. QA of Doppler ultrasound equipment is very important as data obtained from these systems is used in patient management. It was found that if the braided-silk filament of the Doppler phantom was exchanged with an O-ring rubber filament and the velocity range below 50cm/s was avoided for Doppler quality control (QC) measurements, then the Maximum Velocity Accuracy (MVA) …

The Utility Of Deformable Image Registration For Small Artery Visualisation In Contrast-Enhanced Whole Body Mr Angiography, Daniel Foley, Jacinta Browne, Xiahai Zhuang, Barry Sheane, Dearbhail O'Driscoll, Daniel Cannon, Niall Sheehy, James Meaney, Andrew Fagan

Articles

Purpose;

An investigation was carried out into the effect of three image registration techniques on the diagnostic image quality of contrast-enhanced magnetic resonance angiography (CE-MRA) images.

Methods Whole-body CE-MRA data from the lower legs of 27 patients recruited onto a study of asymptomatic atherosclerosis were processed using three deformable image registration algorithms. The resultant diagnostic image quality was evaluated qualitatively in a clinical evaluation by four expert observers, and quantitatively by measuring contrast-to-noise ratios and volumes of blood vessels, and assessing the techniques’ ability to correct for varying degrees of motion.

Results The first registration algorithm (‘AIR’) introduced significant stenosis-mimicking …

Reducing Visual Deficits Caused By Refractive Errors In School And Preschool Children: Results Of A Pilot School Program In The Andean Region Of Apurimac, Peru, Sergio Latorre-Arteaga, Diana Gil-Gonzalez, Olga Enciso, Aoife Phelan, Angel Garcia-Munoz, Johannes Kohler

Articles

Background

Refractive error is defined as the inability of the eye to bring parallel rays of light into focus on the retina, resulting in nearsightedness (myopia), farsightedness (Hyperopia) or astigmatism. Uncorrected refractive error in children is associated with increased morbidity and reduced educational opportunities. Vision screening (VS) is a method for identifying children with visual impairment or eye conditions likely to lead to visual impairment.

Objective

To analyze the utility of vision screening conducted by teachers and to contribute to a better estimation of the prevalence of childhood refractive errors in Apurimac, Peru.

Design

A pilot vision screening program in …