Digital Commons Network^™

Evolution Of The Statistical Distribution In A Topological Defect Network, Fei Xue, Xueyun Wang, Ion Socolenco, Yijia Gu, Longqing Chen, Sang-Wook Cheong

Materials Science and Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

The complex networks of numerous topological defects in hexagonal manganites are highly relevant to vastly different phenomena from the birth of our cosmos to superfluidity transition. The topological defects in hexagonal manganites form two types of domain networks: type-I without and type-II with electric self-poling. A combined phase-field simulations and experimental study shows that the frequencies of domains with N-sides, i.e. of N-gons, in a type-I network are fitted by a lognormal distribution, whereas those in type-II display a scale-free power-law distribution with exponent ~ 2. A preferential attachment process that N-gons with a larger N have higher probability of …

Infinite-Noise Criticality: Nonequilibrium Phase Transitions In Fluctuating Environments, Thomas Vojta, José A. Hoyos

Physics Faculty Research & Creative Works

We study the effects of time-varying environmental noise on nonequilibrium phase transitions in spreading and growth processes. Using the examples of the logistic evolution equation as well as the contact process, we show that such temporal disorder gives rise to a distinct type of critical points at which the effective noise amplitude diverges on long time scales. This leads to enormous density fluctuations characterized by an infinitely broad probability distribution at criticality. We develop a real-time renormalization-group theory that provides a general framework for the effects of temporal disorder on nonequilibrium processes. We also discuss how general this exotic critical …

Panel Data Models With Interactive Fixed Effects And Multiple Structural Breaks, Degui Li, Junhui Qian, Liangjun Su

Research Collection School Of Economics

In this paper we consider estimation of common structural breaks in panel data models with unobservable interactive fixed effects. We introduce a penalized principal component (PPC) estimation procedure with an adaptive group fused LASSO to detect the multiple structural breaks in the models. Under some mild conditions, we show that with probability approaching one the proposed method can correctly determine the unknown number of breaks and consistently estimate the common break dates. Furthermore, we estimate the regression coefficients through the post-LASSO method and establish the asymptotic distribution theory for the resulting estimators. The developed methodology and theory are applicable to …

Testing For Multiple Bubbles: Limit Theory Of Real-Time Detectors, Peter C. B. Phillips, Shuping Shi, Jun Yu

Research Collection School Of Economics

This article provides the limit theory of real-time dating algorithms for bubble detection that were suggested in Phillips, Wu, and Yu (PWY; International Economic Review 52 [2011], 201-26) and in a companion paper by the present authors (Phillips, Shi, and Yu, 2015; PSY; International Economic Review 56 [2015a], 1099-1134. Bubbles are modeled using mildly explosive bubble episodes that are embedded within longer periods where the data evolve as a stochastic trend, thereby capturing normal market behavior as well as exuberance and collapse. Both the PWY and PSY estimates rely on recursive right-tailed unit root tests (each with a different recursive …

Capital As Artificial Intelligence, Gerry Canavan

English Faculty Research and Publications

This article examines science-fictional allegorizations of Soviet-style planned economies, financial markets, autonomous trading algorithms, and global capitalism writ large as nonhuman artificial intelligences, focussing primarily on American science fiction of the Cold War period. Key fictional texts discussed include Star Trek, Isaac Asimov's Machine stories, Terminator, Kurt Vonnegut's Player Piano (1952), Charles Stross's Accelerando (2005), and the short stories of Philip K. Dick. The final section of the article discusses Kim Stanley Robinson's novel 2312 (2012) within the contemporary political context of accelerationist anticapitalism, whose advocates propose working with “the machines” rather than against them.

Road Weather Severity Based On Environmental Energy, Michael E. Baldwin, Derrick Snyder, Chase Miller, Kimberly Hoogewind

JTRP Technical Reports

Effective and efficient removal of snow and ice from public roadways is a key outcome for winter road maintenance operations. This outcome depends on the severity of the wintry weather as well as the quality and quantity of resources used to treat the roadways. Wintry weather conditions vary substantially from hour-to-hour, storm-to-storm, and season-to-season. Many different transportation departments have used empirical statistical models and machine learning methods based upon weather parameters to develop indices to estimate the severity of winter weather. Many of these previous studies used summary statistics, such as the number of days with certain events (snowfall, freezing …

Using Similarity To Achieve Trust To Enhance Decision Making In Vehicular Safety Applications, Hind Obaid Hamad Saeed Al Falasi

Dissertations

Vehicles exchange different types of messages either periodically or as needed for different types of applications. The data in the network of vehicles can be used to extract valuable knowledge to support various applications in vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs). Knowledge gained from the gathered data can be used to create local views of the network for individual vehicles; for instance, a vehicle can form a view of a subset of the network using neighboring vehicles’ directions of travel, speeds, and the types of applications they run. In the network, vehicles that have common attributes and requirements facilitate the establishment …

Deanotes, College Of Science And Technology, Armstrong State University

College of Science & Technology Dean's Notes (Archived)

No abstract provided.

An Upscaled Approach For Transport In Media With Extended Tailing Due To Back-Diffusion Using Analytical And Numerical Solutions Of The Advection Dispersion Equation, Jack C. Parker, Ungtae Kim

Civil and Environmental Engineering Faculty Publications

The mono-continuum advection-dispersion equation (mADE) is commonly regarded as unsuitable for application to media that exhibit rapid breakthrough and extended tailing associated with diffusion between high and low permeability regions. This paper demonstrates that the mADE can be successfully used to model such conditions if certain issues are addressed. First, since hydrodynamic dispersion, unlike molecular diffusion, cannot occur upstream of the contaminant source, models must be formulated to prevent “back-dispersion.” Second, large variations in aquifer permeability will result in differences between volume-weighted average concentration (resident concentration) and flow-weighted average concentration (flux concentration). Water samples taken from wells may be regarded …

Humanism, Fatherhood, And Science In The Court Of Urbino: The History Behind The Portrait Of Federico Da Montefeltro And His Son Guidobaldo, Christian Blake Pye

Armstrong Undergraduate Journal of History

About the author

Christian Pye is a senior seeking a Bachelor of Arts in History at Armstrong State University. Christian plans to continue onto graduate education where he will focus on Medieval Islamic Studies.

Spin-Fluctuation Mechanism Of Anomalous Temperature Dependence Of Magnetocrystalline Anisotropy In Itinerant Magnets, I. A. Zhuravlev, V. P. Antropov, K. D. Belashchenko

Department of Physics and Astronomy: Faculty Publications

The origins of the anomalous temperature dependence of magnetocrystalline anisotropy in (Fe_1−xCo_x)₂B alloys are elucidated using first-principles calculations within the disordered local moment model. Excellent agreement with experimental data is obtained. The anomalies are associated with the changes in band occupations due to Stoner-like band shifts and with the selective suppression of spin-orbit “hot spots” by thermal spin fluctuations. Under certain conditions, the anisotropy can increase, rather than decrease, with decreasing magnetization due to these peculiar electronic mechanisms, which contrast starkly with those assumed in existing models.

Excess Mid-Infrared Flux: An Indicator Of Mass Loss In Cepheids?, Edward G. Schmidt

Edward Schmidt Publications

Spectral energy distributions for 132 classical and type II Cepheids were searched for evidence of excess flux above the photospheric level in the mid-infrared. Eight of them were found to have unambiguously strong excess emission while a further 13 showed evidence of weak emission. The presence of emission appears to be unrelated to either the pulsational amplitude or the effective temperature while strong emission is limited to stars with periods longer than 11 days, with a single exception. For the stars with strong emission we attempted to fit the energy distribution with a stellar wind model. No acceptable fit could …

8000 Years Of Environmental Evolution Of Barrier–Lagoon Systems Emplaced In Coastal Embayments (Nw Iberia), Rita González-Villanueva, Marta Pérez-Arlucea, Susana Costas, Roberto Bao, Xose L. Otero, Ronald J. Goble

Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences: Faculty Publications

The rocky and indented coast of NW Iberia is characterized by the presence of highly valuable and vulnerable, small and shallow barrier– lagoon systems structurally controlled. The case study was selected to analyse barrier–lagoon evolution based on detailed sedimentary architecture, chronology, geochemical and biological proxies. The main objective is to test the hypothesis of structural control and the significance at regional scale of any highenergy event recorded. This work is also aimed at identifying general patterns and conceptualizing the formation and evolution of this type of coastal systems. The results allowed us to establish a conceptual model of Holocene evolution …

Salary & Benefits Schedule And Teacher Tenure Study, Matthew Berman, Alexandra Hill, Diane Hirshberg, Dayna Defeo

CAEPR Reports

No abstract provided.

Identifying Secondary Crashes By Using Geographic Information System (Gis) And Determining The Secondary Crashes Characteristics, Yuan Tian

Doctoral Dissertations and Master's Theses

As the nation’s transportation infrastructure expands, traffic incidents led to more than 25% of traffic congestion in the United States (FHWA, 2014). The risk of the occurrence of secondary crashes can be six times higher in the presence of a primary crash than that at a normal traffic condition (Yang et al., 2013 and Tedesco, 1994). The purpose of this study is 1) to develop a method to identify the secondary crashes with the primary incidents in Geographic Information Systems (GIS) under different spatial-temporal criteria, and 2) to determine the impacts of spatial-temporal criteria on the secondary crash characteristics in …

Lumped Parameter Model For A Self Powered Fontan Palliation Of The Hypoplastic Left Heart Syndrome, Jang Ho Park

Doctoral Dissertations and Master's Theses

Out of all newborn infants with congenital heart disease (CHD), 8% have a single functioning ventricle. The Fontan surgical procedure, where the superior and inferior venous returns are connected directly to the pulmonary arteries to allow the single functioning ventricle to perfuse the systemic circulation, has been around for decades, yet the patients who undergo this operation suffer from chronic illnesses and their survivability is less than 50% by adulthood [1-10]. Some suggest that the Fontan operation can be improved by implanting a synthetic pump. However, synthetic pumps also present some complications due to mechanical failure, risk of stroke, and …

Real-Time Supervised Detection Of Pink Areas In Dermoscopic Images Of Melanoma: Importance Of Color Shades, Texture And Location, Ravneet Kaur, P. P. Albano, Justin G. Cole, Jason R. Hagerty, Robert W. Leander, Randy Hays Moss, William V. Stoecker

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

Background/Purpose: Early detection of malignant melanoma is an important public health challenge. In the USA, dermatologists are seeing more melanomas at an early stage, before classic melanoma features have become apparent. Pink color is a feature of these early melanomas. If rapid and accurate automatic detection of pink color in these melanomas could be accomplished, there could be significant public health benefits.

Methods: Detection of three shades of pink (light pink, dark pink, and orange pink) was accomplished using color analysis techniques in five color planes (red, green, blue, hue, and saturation). Color shade analysis was performed using a logistic …

Community College Students' Academic Success And Persistence In Math Courses After Developmental Math: A Case Study, Robin Bontrager

Doctoral Dissertations and Projects

This qualitative research study was a bounded case study exploring how and why community college students achieved academic success after completion of the developmental math sequence and a college level math course. The purpose of this research was to explore how and why community college students were academically successful in college algebra or elementary statistics after completion of the developmental math sequence. For the purpose of this study, the students' changes in behavior that influenced academic success and persistence in their math courses were generally defined as involvement in academic support programs, integration into social groups, and the perception of …

The Effects Of Student Self-Assessment With Goal Setting On Fourth Grade Mathematics Students: Creating Self-Regulating Agents Of Learning, Laura Clift

Doctoral Dissertations and Projects

With the national trend toward student accountability as learners, few studies have identified effective instructional strategies that motivate elementary students in becoming agents of learning and the effect of these strategies on academic achievement. This quantitative study investigated the effect of student self-assessment with goal setting (SAGS), based on the work of Stiggins, Arter, Chappuis, and Chappuis (2006), on elementary school students’ academic achievement and motivation in mathematics. This study employed a quasi-experimental, pretest-posttest, nonequivalent control-group design. Participants were 130 students drawn from six intact classes of fourth graders from five elementary schools located in a large Archdiocese in the …

A Phenomenological Study Of Public School Biology Teachers Who Believe In The Literal Genesis Account Of Creation, Eric Dougherty

Doctoral Dissertations and Projects

he purpose of this phenomenological study was to understand the experiences of Christian public high school biology teachers who believe in a literal, young earth account of creation as revealed in the book of Genesis. There is a gap in the literature regarding understanding the teaching experiences of Christians who believe in a strict interpretation of the biblical book of Genesis. This study was conducted by interviewing 11 Christian public school biology teachers from multiple states who met the criteria for being identified as young earth creationists. Data were also collected through a focus group and reflective vignettes. Data were …

Integrating The Psychological Audit Of Interpersonal Relationships Into Short-Term Pastoral Marital Counseling – Help Or Hindrance?, Floyd Marsh

Doctoral Dissertations and Projects

This research project was undertaken to determine if integrating the Psychological Audit of Interpersonal Relationships (PAIR) test into a short-term pastoral marital counseling model would help or hinder the busy multi-tasking pastor in economizing his time and improving his effectiveness while counseling couples presenting with mild to moderate dissatisfaction. The PAIR test is a relationship compatibility inventory, used by psychologists, physicians, professional counselors, and licensed clinical social workers, which assesses 20 separate dimensions of interest, personality, behavior, attitudes, and values. The research findings of this study strongly suggest that the PAIR test, when integrated into the counseling plan, will help …

An Electrodeposited Inhomogeneous Metal-Insulator-Semiconductor Junction For Efficient Photoelectrochemical Water Oxidation, James C. Hill, Alan T. Landers, Jay A. Switzer

Chemistry Faculty Research & Creative Works

The photoelectrochemical splitting of water into hydrogen and oxygen requires a semiconductor to absorb light and generate electron-hole pairs, and a catalyst to enhance the kinetics of electron transfer between the semiconductor and solution. A crucial question is how this catalyst affects the band bending in the semiconductor, and, therefore, the photovoltage of the cell. We introduce a simple and inexpensive electrodeposition method to produce an efficient n-Si/SiOx/Co/CoOOH photoanode for the photoelectrochemical oxidation of water to oxygen. The photoanode functions as a solid-state, metal-insulator-semiconductor photovoltaic cell with spatially non-uniform barrier heights in series with a low overpotential water-splitting electrochemical cell. …

Maintaining The Master Patient Index: The Impact Of Patient Registration Processes On Data Integrity, Matthew Biddle

Applied Research Projects

The master patient index is one of the most important components within a healthcare system. It ensures that an individual patient is given a unique identifier that is used across the various separate clinical, financial and administrative systems and ensures that all information about that patient is organized and complete. Ensuring the MPI is accurate is critical since errors can have significant costs- both financially and in terms of patient outcomes. Patient registrars are the first line of defense when it comes to correctly identifying incoming patients and is where many errors in the MPI occur. Errors can be simple …

Using Gamification As A Collaboration Motivator For Software Development Teams: A Preliminary Framework, Flavio Steffens, Sabrina Marczak, Fernando Figueira Filho, Christoph Treude, Leif Singer, David Redmiles, Ban Al-Ani

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Gamification is the use of game elements in non-game context to engage and to motivate people to achieve goals. Its use is becoming very popular in software development organizations due to work being based upon human-centric and brain-intensive activity. This paper presents the topics of collaboration and gamification in the context of software engineering, and proposes a framework that identifies the most common collaboration issues that affect software development teams, and how to apply game elements to motivate a change on their behaviors.

A Method And System For Sentiment Classification And Emotion Classification [Us Patent 20170308523a1], Zhaoxia Wang, Rick Siow Mong Goh, Yinping Yang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

A system and a method for classifying text messages, such as social media messages into sentiment valence categories are provided. The system comprising a module for decomposing text messages, a module for cleaning text messages, a module for producing feature data of text messages, and a module for classifying text messages into sentiment valence categories. The module for decomposing text messages is configured to: receive a text message, parse the text message into separate portions in response to parsing criteria based on sentence delimiters, wherein the separate portions are sentences, phrases and words, and rejoin at least some of the …

Human Action Recognition In Unconstrained Videos By Explicit Motion Modeling, Yu-Gang Jiang, Qi Dai, Wei Liu, Xiangyang Xue, Chong-Wah Ngo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Human action recognition in unconstrained videos is a challenging problem with many applications. Most state-of-the-art approaches adopted the well-known bag-of-features representations, generated based on isolated local patches or patch trajectories, where motion patterns, such as object-object and object-background relationships are mostly discarded. In this paper, we propose a simple representation aiming at modeling these motion relationships. We adopt global and local reference points to explicitly characterize motion information, so that the final representation is more robust to camera movements, which widely exist in unconstrained videos. Our approach operates on the top of visual codewords generated on dense local patch trajectories, …

Vireo-Tno @ Trecvid 2015: Multimedia Event Detection, Hao Zhang, Yi-Jie Lu, Maaike De Boer, Frank Ter Haar, Zhaofan Qiu, Klamer Schutte, Wessel Kraaij, Chong-Wah Ngo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This paper presents an overview and comparative analysis of our systems designed for the TRECVID 2015 [1] multimedia event detection (MED) task. We submitted 17 runs, of which 5 each for the zeroexample, 10-example and 100-example subtasks for the Pre-Specified (PS) event detection and 2 runs for the 10-example subtask for the Ad-Hoc (AH) event detection. We did not participate in the Interactive Run. This year we focus on three different parts of the MED task: 1) extending the size of our concept bank and combining it with improved dense trajectories; 2) exploring strategies for semantic query generation (SQG); and …

Multimedia Event Detection: Strong By Integration, Hao Zhang, Maaike De Boer, Yi-Jie Lu, Klamer Schutte, Chong-Wah Ngo, Chong-Wah Ngo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

No abstract provided.

Event Detection In Wireless Sensor Networks In Random Spatial Sensors Deployments, Pengfei Zhang, Ido Nevat, Gareth W. Peters, Gaoxi Xiao, Hwee-Pink Tan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We develop a new class of event detection algorithms in Wireless Sensor Networks where the sensors are randomly deployed spatially. We formulate the detection problem as a binary hypothesis testing problem and design the optimal decision rules for two scenarios, namely the Poisson Point Process and Binomial Point Process random deployments. To calculate the intractable marginal likelihood density, we develop three types of series expansion methods which are based on an Askey-orthogonal polynomials. In addition, we develop a novel framework to provide guidance on which series expansion is most suitable (i.e., most accurate) to use for different system parameters. Extensive …

Computational Replication Of The Patient-Specific Stenting Procedure For Coronary Artery Bifurcations: From Oct And Ct Imaging To Structural And Hemodynamics Analyses, Claudio Chiastra, Wei Wu, Benjamin Dickerhoff, Ali Aleiou, Gabriele Dubini, Hiromasa Otake, Francesco Migliavacca, John F. Ladisa Jr.

Biomedical Engineering Faculty Research and Publications

The optimal stenting technique for coronary artery bifurcations is still debated. With additional advances computational simulations can soon be used to compare stent designs or strategies based on verified structural and hemodynamics results in order to identify the optimal solution for each individual’s anatomy. In this study, patient-specific simulations of stent deployment were performed for 2 cases to replicate the complete procedure conducted by interventional cardiologists. Subsequent computational fluid dynamics (CFD) analyses were conducted to quantify hemodynamic quantities linked to restenosis.

Patient-specific pre-operative models of coronary bifurcations were reconstructed from CT angiography and optical coherence tomography (OCT). Plaque location and …