Digital Commons Network^™

Montana Dragon Boat Festival 2016, Megan Schultz

Institute for Tourism and Recreation Research Publications

This study was conducted for the Kalispell Conventions and Visitor Bureau, to provide insight into the characteristics of attendees of the 2016 Montana Dragon Boat Festival. Paper surveys on site and a post-event web survey were completed by 479 attendees and/or participants of the event. Results show that 58% of respondents were residents of Montana and of those Montana residents, 69% were from Flathead County. Out-of-county respondents spent an average of 3.72 nights away from home. Of those nights, an average of 2.42 of those nights were in the city of Kalispell and 2.89 nights in other Flathead Valley locations …

Facilities Forum, Georgia Southern University

Auxiliary Services (2013-2021)

• Interdisciplinary Academic Building Ground Breaking
• Military Science Ribbon Cutting
• GSU Selected for Technical Testing of MaxCell
• Facilities Electrical Team Busy at Work
• A Job Well Done
• Holiday Safety
• Portable Space Heater Safety
• Employee Spotlight
• Facilities Services Customer Service Survey

A System For Detecting Malicious Insider Data Theft In Iaas Cloud Environments, Jason Nikolai, Yong Wang

Research & Publications

The Cloud Security Alliance lists data theft and insider attacks as critical threats to cloud security. Our work puts forth an approach using a train, monitor, detect pattern which leverages a stateful rule based k-nearest neighbors anomaly detection technique and system state data to detect inside attacker data theft on Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) nodes. We posit, instantiate, and demonstrate our approach using the Eucalyptus cloud computing infrastructure where we observe a 100 percent detection rate for abnormal login events and data copies to outside systems.

Dejong, Schroedel Earn Nscaa All-Southeast Region Women's Soccer Honors, Armstrong State University

Armstrong Athletics: Women's Soccer News (Archived)

DeJong, Schroedel Earn NSCAA All-Southeast Region Women's Soccer Honors. Armstrong State University juniors Olivia DeJong and Randi Schroedel have each been named to the 2016 NSCAA All-Southeast Region women's soccer team, announced today by CoSIDA.

An Examination Of How Ratings Of Airlines Are Effected By Different Types Of Information: A Mediation Analysis, Abdullah Selim Ozyurek

Theses and Dissertations

Many dynamics directly or indirectly influence the decision-making process. An individual’s demographic features, such as gender, country of origin, and emotions are some of the dynamics. In the aviation domain, air passengers purchase their air travel tickets under those dynamics. The purpose of this study was to determine if the airline type, gender of participants, and participants’ country of origin had an effect on ratings of an individual’s perception of safety and willingness to fly, and which emotions had a mediating effect on this relationship. The study included Lufthansa Airlines and Turkish Airlines from Europe. The affect was the participants’ …

Consumer Likelihood To Complain In The U.S. Commercial Airline Industry, Xinpei Lu

Theses and Dissertations

Consumer emotions play an important role in the marketplace nowadays, which can either directly or indirectly affect the marketing outcomes. Consumer complaints are believed to occur if consumers begin to generate negative emotions due to an unfavorable service experience. However, there are also existing controversies. Moreover, males and females tended to show different attitudes towards complaining in different situations. There is a great significance of doing the research of consumer complaints in commercial airline industry because a majority of the predominant research concentrates on the consumer complaint behaviors in market places such as restaurant, hospital, hotel, and shopping mall. The …

An Examination Of The 16pf Validity Scales As Predictors Of The Scale Of Accurate Personality Prediction (Sapp), Katherine E. Schmieder

Theses and Dissertations

The Scale of Accurate Personality Prediction (SAPP) was derived from the 16 Personality Factor Questionnaire (16-PF) as a measure of self-knowledge by comparing the degree of similarity of a participant’s predicted and obtained 16 PF results. The purpose of this study was to examine the utilization of the16PF validity scales as potential predictors of an individual’s score on the Scale of Accurate Personality Prediction (SAPP). A series of multiple regression analyses were performed on the current database of 641 respondents. Additionally, to provide additional validity, the database was split into two halves, and the multiple regression analyses were run on …

Correlates Of The Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory-2 Restructured Form (Mmpi-2-Rf) Scores For Asian Indian College Students, Saloni Taneja

Theses and Dissertations

This study was designed to investigate empirical correlates of the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory-2-Restructured Form (MMPI-2-RF) for Asian Indian college students using the NEO Five Factor Inventory-3, College Maladjustment Scales and Measures of Psychosocial Development. The study utilized an Asian Indian college student sample (N=48) from a private university in Florida. Pearson Product Moment correlations were computed to establish correlates of the MMPI-2-RF scale scores. Overall, a large number of significant correlates with large effect sizes were found across the three measures. Some correlates found in the study provided an expansion for the interpretation of the MMPI-2-RF scales for Asian …

The Kinematics And X-Ray Emission Mechanism Of The Large-Scale Jet Of 3c 111, Devon Clautice

Theses and Dissertations

Relativistic jets are the most energetic manifestation of the active galactic nucleus (AGN) phenomenon. AGN jets are observed from the radio through gamma rays and carry copious amounts of matter and energy from the sub-parsec central regions out to the kiloparsec and often megaparsec scale galaxy and cluster environs. While most spatially-resolved jets are seen in the radio, an increasing number have been discovered to emit in the optical/near-IR and/or X-ray bands. Here we discuss a spectacular example of this class, the 3C 111 jet, housed in one of the nearest, double-lobed FR II radio galaxies known. We discuss new, …

Digital Quorum Sensing For Self-Organizing Malware, Mark E. Fioravanti Ii

Theses and Dissertations

INTRODUCTION: Malware authors present an interesting problem for the security community as they evolve and adapt to overcome network and host defenses. The determined adversary is a special class of malware author who may attempt to disrupt national interests. These adversaries may seek potentially novel Command and Control (C2) channels to coordinate their activities. Isolated and air-gapped networks pose an interesting challenge that these adversaries must adapt to in order to maintain persistence on these networks. In this work we propose that a determined adversary may seek to implement a digital quorum sensing system inspired by the quorum sensing systems …

Specialized Distributed Hardware Design For Real-Time Atmospheric Turbulence Mitigation Error Correction Calculation, Subhadra Subramanian

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis demonstrates an approach to solve execution challenges of Image processing of an Atmospheric turbulence mitigation technique in real-time. An atmospheric turbulence mitigation technique is used to eliminate the aberrations caused by turbulence in the images. The error calculation is a mathematically intensive process, that includes Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) to convert the image from the spatial domain to the spatial frequency domain. The FPGA based hardware accelerator design and architectures are investigated in this work to perform Fast Fourier Transform and error calculations in real-time, defined as 30Hz. A scalable and parallel platform is designed to execute the …

Feature Based Object Tracking: A Probabilistic Approach, Kaleb Smith

Theses and Dissertations

Video analysis is a rich research topic, due to the wide spectrum of applications such as surveillance, activity recognition, security, and event detection. One of the important challenges in video analysis is object tracking, which provides the ability to determine the exact location of an object of interest within each frame. Many challenges affect the efficiency of a tracking algorithm such as scene illumination change, occlusion, scaling change and determining a search window from which to track object(s). We present an integrated probabilistic model for object track- ing, that combines implicit dynamic shape representations and probabilistic object modeling. We demonstrate …

A Self-Organized Approach For Detecting Communities In Networks, Ben Collingsworth

Theses and Dissertations

The community structure of networks reveals hidden information about the whole network structure that cannot be discerned using other topological properties. Yet, the importance of identifying community structure in networks to many fields such as medicine, social sciences and national security, calls for better approaches for performing this identification. The prevalent community detection algorithms, such as the one proposed by Girvan and Newman, utilize a centralized approach that is unlikely to scale to very large networks and does not handle dynamic networks. Further, existing algorithms provide limited information regarding community overlap, where an individual participates in multiple communities. We propose …

Proactive Approach For The Prevention Of Ddos Attacks In Cloud Computing Environments, Brad Alshehry

Theses and Dissertations

Contemporary security systems attempt to provide protection against distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks; however, they mostly use a variety of computing and hardware resources for load distribution and request delays. As a result, ordinary users and website visitors experience timeouts, captchas, and lowspeed connections. In this paper, we propose a new multilayer system for protection against DDoS in the cloud that utilizes Threat Intelligence techniques and a proactive approach to detect traffic behavior anomalies. The first layer of the model analyzes the source IP address in the header of incoming traffic packets and the second layer analyzes the speed of requests …

Looking Backward, Looking Forward: The Long, Torturous Struggle With Mosquitoes, Gordon M. Patterson

Arts and Communication Faculty Publications

The American anti-mosquito movement grew out of the discovery of the role of mosquitoes in transferring pathogens and public concern about pest and nuisance mosquitoes in the late 1800s. In the 20th century, organized mosquito control in the United States passed through three eras: mechanical, chemical, and integrated mosquito control. Mosquito control in the 21st century faces the challenge of emerging pathogens, invasive mosquito species, and balancing concerns about the environment with effective control strategies.

Discrete And Continuous Operational Calculus In Stochastic Games, Kenneth Ibe Iwezulu

Theses and Dissertations

First, we consider a class of antagonistic stochastic games between two players A and B. The game is specified in terms of two "hostile" stochastic processes representing mutual attacks upon random times exerting casualties of random magnitudes. This game is observed upon random epochs of time and the outcome of the game is not known in real time. The game ends at the time when the underlying fixed threshold of either player is crossed (referred to as the first passage time). The first passage time is then shifted to an epoch, i.e. upon one of the observation instants of time. …

Numerical Study Of Erosion Of The Internal Wall Of Sales Gas Piping By Black Powder Particles, Ahmed Saud Al-Haidari

Theses and Dissertations

Micro particles, primarily from iron, can wreak havoc on a Sales Gas System. For example, the transport of particles with the gas flow can cause erosion damage to the piping system, lead to the release of toxic gasses, and interrupt the operation. The objective of the current work is to examine the erosion rate (ER) in an existing Sales Gas Piping System by simulating different black powder particles sizes and considering variable operation conditions. An elbow-shaped pipe spool is used to determine the area of maximum destruction. It will help the designer, engineer and operation personnel to predict the ER …

United States Department Of Homeland Security Response To The Office Of Science And Technology Policy Memo, 2013: Public Access Plan (December 2016)

Copyright, Fair Use, Scholarly Communication, etc.

DHS response to OSTP memo, 2013: Public Access Plan (December 2016)

The Effects Of Active Learning Technology On Instructors’ Practices And Students’ Engagement And Grades: A Mixed Methods Study, Jeremy C. Van Hof

Department of Teaching, Learning, and Teacher Education: Theses and Other Student Research

Partly in response to university teachers’ changing pedagogies marked by flipping instruction, lecture capture technologies are evolving into active learning systems. Little published research exists on the effects of active learning technology on either teachers or students. This two-phase sequential explanatory mixed methods study details the effects that active learning systems have on instructor practices and on student grades and engagement. Phase one combined quantitative data collection with instructor interviews. Phase one findings show higher student engagement levels correlate with the use of the active learning system only in the presence of very specific, flipped classroom practices. Phase two, a …

Across The Great Divide: Findings And Possibilities For Action From The 2016 Summit Meeting Of Academic Libraries And University Presses With Administrative Relationships (P2l), Mary Rose Muccie, Joe Lucia, Elliott Shore, Clifford Lynch, Peter Berkery

Copyright, Fair Use, Scholarly Communication, etc.

The library-press relationship explored in P2L allows for transformative approaches in support and dissemination of scholarship. Effective exploitation of these partnerships is in the early stages and there is an opportunity to influence the outcomes to ensure they are as broadly applicable and scalable as possible. As Cliff Lynch (CNI) noted in his summary of the day’s conversation, we must do more exploration of both intra-institutional (library and press) and cross-institutional collaborations. He provided several compelling suggestions for partnerships, including new ways to promote and leverage library special collections as well as ideas for increasing discoverability of press content. (See …

News From The Bioconductor Project, Bioconductor Core Team

The R Journal

The Bioconductor project provides tools for the analysis and comprehension of high throughput genomic data. Bioconductor 3.4 was released on 18 October, 2016. It is com patible with R 3.3 and consists of 1296 software packages, 309 experiment data packages, and 933 up-to-date annotation packages. The release announcement includes descriptions of 101 new packages, and updated NEWS files for many additional packages. Start using Bioconductor by installing the most recent version of R and evaluating the commands

Weighted Distance Based Discriminant Analysis: The R Package Wedibadis, Itziar Irigoien, Francesc Mestres, Concepcion Arenas

The R Journal

The WeDiBaDis package provides a user friendly environment to perform discriminant analysis (supervised classification). WeDiBaDis is an easy to use package addressed to the biological and medical communities, and in general, to researchers interested in applied studies. It can be suitable when the user is interested in the problem of constructing a discriminant rule on the basis of distances between a relatively small number of instances or units of known unbalanced-class membership measured on many (possibly thousands) features of any type. This is a current situation when analyzing genetic biomedical data. This discriminant rule can then be used both, as …

Computing Pareto Frontiers And Database Preferences With The Rpref Package, Patrick Roocks

The R Journal

The concept of Pareto frontiers is well-known in economics. Within the database community there exist many different solutions for the specification and calculation of Pareto frontiers, also called Skyline queries in the database context. Slight generalizations like the combination of the Pareto operator with the lexicographical order have been established under the term database preferences. In this paper we present the rPref package which allows to efficiently deal with these concepts within R. With its help, database preferences can be specified in a very similar way as in a state-of-the-art database management system. Our package provides algorithms for an …

Dcovts: Distance Covariance/Correlation For Time Series, Maria Pitsillou, Konstantinos Fokianos

The R Journal

The distance covariance function is a new measure of dependence between random vectors. We drop the assumption of iid data to introduce distance covariance for time series. The R package dCovTS provides functions that compute and plot distance covariance and correlation functions for both univariate and multivariate time series. Additionally it includes functions for testing serial independence based on distance covariance. This paper describes the theoretical background of distance covariance methodology in time series and discusses in detail the implementation of these methods with the R package dCovTS.

Escape From Boxland, Barret Schloerke, Hadley Wickham, Dianne Cook, Heike Hofmann

The R Journal

A library of common geometric shapes can be used to train our brains for understanding data structure in high-dimensional Euclidean space. This article describes the methods for producing cubes, spheres, simplexes, and tori in multiple dimensions. It also describes new ways to define and generate high-dimensional tori. The algorithms are described, critical code chunks are given, and a large collection of generated data are provided. These are available in the R package geozoo, and selected movies and images, are available on the GeoZoo web site (http://schloerke.github.io/geozoo/)

An Introduction To Principal Surrogate Evaluation With The Pseval Package, Michael C. Sachs, Erin E. Gabriel

The R Journal

We describe a new package called pseval that implements the core methods for the evaluation of principal surrogates in a single clinical trial. It provides a flexible interface for defining models for the risk given treatment and the surrogate, the models for integration over the missing counterfactual surrogate responses, and the estimation methods. Estimated maximum likelihood and pseudo-score can be used for estimation, and the bootstrap for inference. A variety of post-estimation methods are provided, including print, summary, plot, and testing. We summarize the main statistical methods that are implemented in the package and illustrate its use from the perspective …

Variants Of Simple Correspondence Analysis, Rosaria Lombardo, Eric J. Beh

The R Journal

This paper presents the R package CAvariants (Lombardo and Beh, 2017). The package performs six variants of correspondence analysis on a two-way contingency table. The main function that shares the same name as the package– CAvariants– allows the user to choose (via a series of input parameters) from six different correspondence analysis procedures. These include the classical approach to (symmetrical) correspondence analysis, singly ordered correspondence analysis, doubly ordered correspondence analysis, non symmetrical correspondence analysis, singly ordered non symmetrical correspondence analysis and doubly ordered non symmetrical correspondence analysis. The code provides the flexibility for constructing either a classical correspondence plot or …

Design Of The Tronco Bioconductor Package For Translational Oncology, Marco Antoniotti, Giulio Caravagna, Luca De Sano, Alex Graudenzi, Giancarlo Mauri, Bud Mishra, Daniele Ramazzotti

The R Journal

Models of cancer progression provide insights on the order of accumulation of genetic alterations during cancer development. Algorithms to infer such models from the currently available mutational profiles collected from different cancer patients (cross-sectional data) have been defined in the literature since late the 90s. These algorithms differ in the way they extract a graphical model of the events modelling the progression, e.g., somatic mutations or copy-number alterations.

TRONCO is an R package for TRanslational ONcology which provides a series of functions to assist the user in the analysis of cross-sectional genomic data and, in particular, it implements …

Multiplencc: Inverse Probability Weighting Of Nested Case-Control Data, Nathalie C. Støer, Sven Ove Samuelsen

The R Journal

Reuse of controls from nested case-control designs can increase efficiency in many situations, for instance with competing risks or in other multiple endpoints situations. The matching between cases and controls must be broken when controls are to be used for other endpoints. A weighted analysis can then be performed to take care of the biased sampling from the cohort. We present the R package multipleNCC for reuse of controls in nested case-control studies by inverse probability weighting of the partial likelihood. The package handles right-censored, left-truncated and additionally matched data, and varying numbers of sampled controls and the whole analysis …

Editorial, Michael Lawrence

The R Journal

On behalf of the editorial board, I am pleased to publish Volume 8, Issue 2 of the R Journal. This issue contains 33 contributed research articles. Each of them either presents an R package, a specific extension of an R package or applications using R packages available from the Comprehensive R Archive Network (CRAN, http:://CRAN.R-project.org). This issue highlights the breadth and depth of the R package ecosystem, covering advances in statistical computing and visualization, as well as novel applications of R in specific domains. The authors have described a small but representative sample of the now more than 11000 packages …