Digital Commons Network^™

Notes From Mosier--The Silver Swan, Scott Alan Smith

Against the Grain

No abstract provided.

Random Ramblings--Why Don't Public Librarians Brag More About One Of Their Greatest Successes: Providing Pleasure Reading For Their Patrons?, Bob Holley

Against the Grain

No abstract provided.

Questions And Answers--Copyright Column, Laura N. Gasaway

Against the Grain

No abstract provided.

Pelikan's Antidisambiguation--Identity Literacy: Time To Teach It?, Michael P. Pelikan

Against the Grain

No abstract provided.

Optimizing Library Services--Crystal Ball Gazing: Academic Library Services In The 21st Century, Denise A. Garofalo, Lindsay Johnston, Ann Lupold

Against the Grain

No abstract provided.

The Scholarly Publishing Scene--Necessary Balancing Acts, Myer Kutz

Against the Grain

No abstract provided.

Cooperation Is Key: How Publishers And Libraries Are Working Together To Achieve Common Goals, Michael A. Arthur, Stacy Sieck

Against the Grain

No abstract provided.

Biz Of Acq--Training The New Acquisitions Technician: From New Hire To Competence, Michelle Flinchbaugh

Against the Grain

No abstract provided.

Atg Interviews Don Beagle, Library Director, Belmont Abbey College, Barbara Tierney

Against the Grain

No abstract provided.

Being Earnest With Collections--Investing In Open Access At A Small Academic Library, Jonathan H. Harwell, Michael A. Arthur

Against the Grain

No abstract provided.

Book Reviews--Monographic Musings, Regina Gong

Against the Grain

No abstract provided.

Stacy V. Sieck Profile

Against the Grain

No abstract provided.

Decoder Ring--Reprints And Refrigerators In "The American Comic Book (Critical Insights)", Jerry Spiller

Against the Grain

No abstract provided.

From The Reference Desk--Reviews Of Reference Titles, Tom Gilson

Against the Grain

No abstract provided.

Don's Conference Notes--The Future Of Discovery: A Niso Forum, Donald T. Hawkins

Against the Grain

No abstract provided.

Leisure And Posthumanism In Houellebecq's Platform And Lanzarote, Nurit Buchweitz, Elie Cohen-Gewerc

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In their article "Leisure and Posthumanism in Houellebecq's Platform and Lanzarote" Nuriot Buchweitz and Elie Cohen-Gewerc analyze Michel Houellebecq's novels in the context of leisure studies. They posit that in particular in Platform and Lanzarote Houellebecq explores leisure practices available in industrial societies marked by consumer culture. Further, Buchweitz and Cohen-Gewerc argue that the abundant depictions of leisure in Houellbecq's texts is not unintentional because he introduces the concept of the posthuman condition and rethinks agency and human selfhood as a consequence of the collapse of subjectivity. Employing postmodern indeterminacy, Houellebecq explores contemporary mores and debates the extinction of …

Photography, Writing, Literature: A Book Review Article Of New Work By Brunet And Beckman And Weissberg, Geert Vandermeersche

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.

Electrocoagulation For Oil And Grease Wastewater Treatment Using Aluminum Electrodes., Hisham El-Etriby, Kamal Radwan, Karim Taha

Mansoura Engineering Journal

Batch electrocoagulation (EC) experiments were carried out to evaluate the removal of COD and O&G from wastewater using aluminum electrodes. The effects of operating parameters such as current intensity, initial COD concentration, contact time and NaCl concentration on COD and O&G removal efficiency had been investigated. It was found that increasing current intensity increased COD and O&G removal efficiency. Initial COD concentration had a little effect on removal efficiencies. Results showed that the best performance was obtained using aluminum electrode at a current intensity of 1.3 Ampere and 11.6 volt in 15 min contact time for 1500 mg/L initial COD …

Expression Of Insulin Responsive Genes In Insulin Resistant Conditions, And The Effect Of Selenium On Gene Expression, David L. Ruff

Masters Theses

Chronically high blood glucose levels lead to many problems, such as insulin resistance, the hallmark of Type II diabetes. Increased flux through the hexosamine biosynthesis pathway is one mechanism by which high glucose as well as glucosamine has been shown to induce insulin resistance. This study tests the effects of glucosamine induced insulin resistance on insulin regulation of the metabolic genes glucose-6-phosphate dehydrogenase (G6PDH) and fatty acid synthase (FAS) as well as insulin responsive proteins tribbles homolog (TRIB3) and sterol regulatory element binding protein (SERBP-1c) 1c.

Selenium, a micronutrient has been shown to be an effective insulin mimetic in Type …

Privacy As A Public Good, Joshua A. T. Fairfield, Christoph Engel

Duke Law Journal

Privacy is commonly studied as a private good: my personal data is mine to protect and control, and yours is yours. This conception of privacy misses an important component of the policy problem. An individual who is careless with data exposes not only extensive information about herself, but about others as well. The negative externalities imposed on nonconsenting outsiders by such carelessness can be productively studied in terms of welfare economics. If all relevant individuals maximize private benefit, and expect all other relevant individuals to do the same, neoclassical economic theory predicts that society will achieve a suboptimal level of …

Beyond Bitcoin: Issues In Regulating Blockchain Transactions, Trevor I. Kiviat

Duke Law Journal

The buzz surrounding Bitcoin has reached a fever pitch. Yet in academic legal discussions, disproportionate emphasis is placed on bitcoins (that is, virtual currency), and little mention is made of blockchain technology—the true innovation behind the Bitcoin protocol. Simply, blockchain technology solves an elusive networking problem by enabling “trustless” transactions: value exchanges over computer networks that can be verified, monitored, and enforced without central institutions (for example, banks). This has broad implications for how we transact over electronic networks.

This Note integrates current research from leading computer scientists and cryptographers to elevate the legal community’s understanding of blockchain technology and, …

Independent - Dec. 1, 2015, Rut Ortiz

The Independent (1988-present)

No abstract provided.

Genetic Factors Influencing B-Type Natriuretic Peptide-Mediated Production Of Cyclic Guanosine Monophosphate And Blood Pressure Effects In Heart Failure Patients, David E. Lanfear, Jia Li, Raza Abbas, Ruicong She, Badri Padhukasahasram, Ramesh C. Gupta, David Langholz, W Hw Tang, Keoki L. Williams, Hani N. Sabbah, Sheryl L. Chow

Cardiology Articles

Natriuretic peptides (NPs) represent a critical pathway in heart failure (HF). We explored genetic determinants of pharmacodynamic effects of B-type NP (BNP) and changes in plasma cyclic guanosine monophosphate (cGMP) and blood pressure (BP). HF patients (n = 135) received recombinant human BNP (nesiritide) at standard doses, and plasma cGMP levels were measured at baseline and during infusion. We tested the association of 119 single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) in 4 candidate genes (NPR1, NPR2, NPR3, and membrane metallo-endopeptidase (MME)) with the change in cGMP and BP. Gene-based testing for association of genetic variation with endpoints was significant only for MME. …

Adaptive Scaling Of Cluster Boundaries For Large-Scale Social Media Data Clustering, Lei Meng, Ah-Hwee Tan, Donald C. Wunsch

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The large scale and complex nature of social media data raises the need to scale clustering techniques to big data and make them capable of automatically identifying data clusters with few empirical settings. In this paper, we present our investigation and three algorithms based on the fuzzy adaptive resonance theory (Fuzzy ART) that have linear computational complexity, use a single parameter, i.e., the vigilance parameter to identify data clusters, and are robust to modest parameter settings. The contribution of this paper lies in two aspects. First, we theoretically demonstrate how complement coding, commonly known as a normalization method, changes the …

Mylife: An Online Personal Memory Album, Di Wang, Ah-Hwee Tan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this demo, we illustrate the formation, retrieval, and playback of autobiographical memory in an online personal memory album named MyLife. The memory in MyLife consists of pictorial snapshots of one's life together with the associated context, namely time, location, people, activity, imagery, and emotion. MyLife allows direct import of memories from other online personal photo repositories. For memory retrieval, users can use not only exact cues, but also partial, vague, inaccurate, and random ones. The retrieved memories are then played back as a movie-like slide show with various visual effects and background music. MyLife holds high potential in both …

Silver Assistants For Aging-In-Place, Di Wang, Budhitama Subagdja, Yilin Kang, Ah-Hwee Tan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this demo, we present an assembly of silver assistants for supporting Aging-In-Place (AIP). The virtual agents are designed to serve around the clock to complement human care within the intelligent home environment. Residing in different platforms with ubiquitous access, the agents collaboratively provide holistic care to the elderly users. The demonstration is shown in a 3-D virtual home replicating a typical 5-room apartment in Singapore. Sensory inputs are stored in a knowledge base named Situation Awareness Model (SAM). Therefore, the capabilities of the agents can always be extended by expanding the knowledge defined in SAM. Using the simulation system, …

Supercnn: A Superpixelwise Convolutional Neural Network For Salient Object Detection, Shengfeng He, Rynson W.H. Lau, Wenxi Liu, Zhe Huang, Qingxiong Yang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Existing computational models for salient object detection primarily rely on hand-crafted features, which are only able to capture low-level contrast information. In this paper, we learn the hierarchical contrast features by formulating salient object detection as a binary labeling problem using deep learning techniques. A novel superpixelwise convolutional neural network approach, called SuperCNN, is proposed to learn the internal representations of saliency in an efficient manner. In contrast to the classical convolutional networks, SuperCNN has four main properties. First, the proposed method is able to learn the hierarchical contrast features, as it is fed by two meaningful superpixel sequences, which …

Coordinated Persuasion With Dynamic Group Formation For Collaborative Elderly Care, Budhitama Subagdja, Ah-Hwee Tan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Ageing in place demands a new paradigm of inhouse caregiving allowing many aspects of daily lives to be tackled by smart appliances and technologies. The important challenges include the effective provision of recommendations by multiple parties of caregiver constituting changes of the user's behavior. In this multiagent environment, interdependencies between agents become major issues to tackle. This paper presents an approach of dynamic group formation for autonomous caregiving agents to collaborate in recommending different aspects of well-being. The approach supports the agents to regulate the timing of their recommendations, prevent conflicting messages, and cooperate to make more effective persuasions. A …

Bring-Your-Own-Application (Byoa): Optimal Stochastic Application Migration In Mobile Cloud Computing, Jonathan David Chase, Dusit Niyato, Sivadon Chaisiri

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The increasing popularity of using mobile devices in a work context, has led to the need to be able to support more powerful computation. Users no longer remain in an office or at home to conduct their activities, preferring libraries and cafes. In this paper, we consider a mobile cloud computing scenario in which users bring their own mobile devices and are offered a variety of equipment, e.g., desktop computer, smart- TV, or projector, to migrate their applications to, so as to save battery life, improve usability and performance. We formulate a stochastic optimization problem to optimize the allocation of …

A Hybrid Approach For Increasing Baffling Factors In Contact Tanks, Justin J. Kattnig, Subhas K. Venayagamoorthy

Civil, Architectural and Environmental Engineering Faculty Research & Creative Works

A novel approach using a hybrid combination of internal baffles and industrial packing material is investigated in order to optimize the hydraulic residence time of a 1,500-gal rectangular concrete tank. Hydraulic residence time, which is commonly classified using the baffling factor (BF), was determined from residence time distribution curves obtained using both computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations and physical tracer studies. CFD simulations were used to model two scenarios. The first scenario was a base system consisting of an unbaffled concrete tank, and the second scenario was a two-baffle system. Computational simulation results were experimentally validated via tracer studies on …