UNT Theses and Dissertations - 209 Matching Results

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Mobile-Based Smart Auscultation
Automated GUI Tests Generation for Android Apps Using Q-learning
Mobile applications are growing in popularity and pose new problems in the area of software testing. In particular, mobile applications heavily depend upon user interactions and a dynamically changing environment of system events. In this thesis, we focus on user-driven events and use Q-learning, a reinforcement machine learning algorithm, to generate tests for Android applications under test (AUT). We implement a framework that automates the generation of GUI test cases by using our Q-learning approach and compare it to a uniform random (UR) implementation. A novel feature of our approach is that we generate user-driven event sequences through the GUI, without the source code or the model of the AUT. Hence, considerable amount of cost and time are saved by avoiding the need for model generation for generating the tests. Our results show that the systematic path exploration used by Q-learning results in higher average code coverage in comparison to the uniform random approach.
Brain Computer Interface (BCI) Applications: Privacy Threats and Countermeasures
Determining Whether and When People Participate in the Events They Tweet About
This work describes an approach to determine whether people participate in the events they tweet about. Specifically, we determine whether people are participants in events with respect to the tweet timestamp. We target all events expressed by verbs in tweets, including past, present and events that may occur in future. We define event participant as people directly involved in an event regardless of whether they are the agent, recipient or play another role. We present an annotation effort, guidelines and quality analysis with 1,096 event mentions. We discuss the label distributions and event behavior in the annotated corpus. We also explain several features used and a standard supervised machine learning approach to automatically determine if and when the author is a participant of the event in the tweet. We discuss trends in the results obtained and devise important conclusions.
Exploring Simscape™ Modeling for Piezoelectric Sensor Based Energy Harvester
This work presents an investigation of a piezoelectric sensor based energy harvesting system, which collects energy from the surrounding environment. Increasing costs and scarcity of fossil fuels is a great concern today for supplying power to electronic devices. Furthermore, generating electricity by ordinary methods is a complicated process. Disposal of chemical batteries and cables is polluting the nature every day. Due to these reasons, research on energy harvesting from renewable resources has become mandatory in order to achieve improved methods and strategies of generating and storing electricity. Many low power devices being used in everyday life can be powered by harvesting energy from natural energy resources. Power overhead and power energy efficiency is of prime concern in electronic circuits. In this work, an energy harvester is modeled and simulated in Simscape™ for the functional analysis and comparison of achieved outcomes with previous work. Results demonstrate that the harvester produces power in the 0 μW to 100 μW range, which is an adequate amount to provide supply to low power devices. Power efficiency calculations also demonstrate that the implemented harvester is capable of generating and storing power for low power pervasive applications.
Extracting Useful Information from Social Media during Disaster Events
Object Recognition Using Scale-Invariant Chordiogram
This thesis describes an approach for object recognition using the chordiogram shape-based descriptor. Global shape representations are highly susceptible to clutter generated due to the background or other irrelevant objects in real-world images. To overcome the problem, we aim to extract precise object shape using superpixel segmentation, perceptual grouping, and connected components. The employed shape descriptor chordiogram is based on geometric relationships of chords generated from the pairs of boundary points of an object. The chordiogram descriptor applies holistic properties of the shape and also proven suitable for object detection and digit recognition mechanisms. Additionally, it is translation invariant and robust to shape deformations. In spite of such excellent properties, chordiogram is not scale-invariant. To this end, we propose scale invariant chordiogram descriptors and intend to achieve a similar performance before and after applying scale invariance. Our experiments show that we achieve similar performance with and without scale invariance for silhouettes and real world object images. We also show experiments at different scales to confirm that we obtain scale invariance for chordiogram.
Privacy Preserving EEG-based Authentication Using Perceptual Hashing
The use of electroencephalogram (EEG), an electrophysiological monitoring method for recording the brain activity, for authentication has attracted the interest of researchers for over a decade. In addition to exhibiting qualities of biometric-based authentication, they are revocable, impossible to mimic, and resistant to coercion attacks. However, EEG signals carry a wealth of information about an individual and can reveal private information about the user. This brings significant privacy issues to EEG-based authentication systems as they have access to raw EEG signals. This thesis proposes a privacy-preserving EEG-based authentication system that preserves the privacy of the user by not revealing the raw EEG signals while allowing the system to authenticate the user accurately. In that, perceptual hashing is utilized and instead of raw EEG signals, their perceptually hashed values are used in the authentication process. In addition to describing the authentication process, algorithms to compute the perceptual hash are developed based on two feature extraction techniques. Experimental results show that an authentication system using perceptual hashing can achieve performance comparable to a system that has access to raw EEG signals if enough EEG channels are used in the process. This thesis also presents a security analysis to show that perceptual hashing can prevent information leakage.
Modeling and Simulation of the Vector-Borne Dengue Disease and the Effects of Regional Variation of Temperature in the Disease Prevalence in Homogenous and Heterogeneous Human Populations
The history of mitigation programs to contain vector-borne diseases is a story of successes and failures. Due to the complex interplay among multiple factors that determine disease dynamics, the general principles for timely and specific intervention for incidence reduction or eradication of life-threatening diseases has yet to be determined. This research discusses computational methods developed to assist in the understanding of complex relationships affecting vector-borne disease dynamics. A computational framework to assist public health practitioners with exploring the dynamics of vector-borne diseases, such as malaria and dengue in homogenous and heterogeneous populations, has been conceived, designed, and implemented. The framework integrates a stochastic computational model of interactions to simulate horizontal disease transmission. The intent of the computational modeling has been the integration of stochasticity during simulation of the disease progression while reducing the number of necessary interactions to simulate a disease outbreak. While there are improvements in the computational time reducing the number of interactions needed for simulating disease dynamics, the realization of interactions can remain computationally expensive. Using multi-threading technology to improve performance upon the original computational model, multi-threading experimental results have been tested and reported. In addition, to the contact model, the modeling of biological processes specific to the corresponding pathogen-carrier vector to increase the specificity of the vector-borne disease has been integrated. Last, automation for requesting, retrieving, parsing, and storing specific weather data and geospatial information from federal agencies to study the differences between homogenous and heterogeneous populations has been implemented.
Network Security Tool for a Novice
Network security is a complex field that is handled by security professionals who need certain expertise and experience to configure security systems. With the ever increasing size of the networks, managing them is going to be a daunting task. What kind of solution can be used to generate effective security configurations by both security professionals and nonprofessionals alike? In this thesis, a web tool is developed to simplify the process of configuring security systems by translating direct human language input into meaningful, working security rules. These human language inputs yield the security rules that the individual wants to implement in their network. The human language input can be as simple as, "Block Facebook to my son's PC". This tool will translate these inputs into specific security rules and install the translated rules into security equipment such as virtualized Cisco FWSM network firewall, Netfilter host-based firewall, and Snort Network Intrusion Detection. This tool is implemented and tested in both a traditional network and a cloud environment. One thousand input policies were collected from various users such as staff from UNT departments' and health science, including individuals with network security background as well as students with a non-computer science background to analyze the tool's performance. The tool is tested for its accuracy (91%) in generating a security rule. It is also tested for accuracy of the translated rule (86%) compared to a standard rule written by security professionals. Nevertheless, the network security tool built has shown promise to both experienced and inexperienced people in network security field by simplifying the provisioning process to result in accurate and effective network security rules.
An Empirical Study of How Novice Programmers Use the Web
Learning from small data set for object recognition in mobile platforms.
Did you stand at a door with a bunch of keys and tried to find the right one to unlock the door? Did you hold a flower and wonder the name of it? A need of object recognition could rise anytime and any where in our daily lives. With the development of mobile devices object recognition applications become possible to provide immediate assistance. However, performing complex tasks in even the most advanced mobile platforms still faces great challenges due to the limited computing resources and computing power. In this thesis, we present an object recognition system that resides and executes within a mobile device, which can efficiently extract image features and perform learning and classification. To account for the computing constraint, a novel feature extraction method that minimizes the data size and maintains data consistency is proposed. This system leverages principal component analysis method and is able to update the trained classifier when new examples become available . Our system relieves users from creating a lot of examples and makes it user friendly. The experimental results demonstrate that a learning method trained with a very small number of examples can achieve recognition accuracy above 90% in various acquisition conditions. In addition, the system is able to perform learning efficiently.
Algorithm Optimizations in Genomic Analysis Using Entropic Dissection
Automatic Removal of Complex Shadows From Indoor Videos
Computational Methods for Discovering and Analyzing Causal Relationships in Health Data
Computational Methods for Vulnerability Analysis and Resource Allocation in Public Health Emergencies
Freeform Cursive Handwriting Recognition Using a Clustered Neural Network
Optical character recognition (OCR) software has advanced greatly in recent years. Machine-printed text can be scanned and converted to searchable text with word accuracy rates around 98%. Reasonably neat hand-printed text can be recognized with about 85% word accuracy. However, cursive handwriting still remains a challenge, with state-of-the-art performance still around 75%. Algorithms based on hidden Markov models have been only moderately successful, while recurrent neural networks have delivered the best results to date. This thesis explored the feasibility of using a special type of feedforward neural network to convert freeform cursive handwriting to searchable text. The hidden nodes in this network were grouped into clusters, with each cluster being trained to recognize a unique character bigram. The network was trained on writing samples that were pre-segmented and annotated. Post-processing was facilitated in part by using the network to identify overlapping bigrams that were then linked together to form words and sentences. With dictionary assisted post-processing, the network achieved word accuracy of 66.5% on a small, proprietary corpus. The contributions in this thesis are threefold: 1) the novel clustered architecture of the feed-forward neural network, 2) the development of an expanded set of observers combining image masks, modifiers, and feature characterizations, and 3) the use of overlapping bigrams as the textual working unit to assist in context analysis and reconstruction.
Integrity Verification of Applications on RADIUM Architecture
Trusted Computing capability has become ubiquitous these days, and it is being widely deployed into consumer devices as well as enterprise platforms. As the number of threats is increasing at an exponential rate, it is becoming a daunting task to secure the systems against them. In this context, the software integrity measurement at runtime with the support of trusted platforms can be a better security strategy. Trusted Computing devices like TPM secure the evidence of a breach or an attack. These devices remain tamper proof if the hardware platform is physically secured. This type of trusted security is crucial for forensic analysis in the aftermath of a breach. The advantages of trusted platforms can be further leveraged if they can be used wisely. RADIUM (Race-free on-demand Integrity Measurement Architecture) is one such architecture, which is built on the strength of TPM. RADIUM provides an asynchronous root of trust to overcome the TOC condition of DRTM. Even though the underlying architecture is trusted, attacks can still compromise applications during runtime by exploiting their vulnerabilities. I propose an application-level integrity measurement solution that fits into RADIUM, to expand the trusted computing capability to the application layer. This is based on the concept of program invariants that can be used to learn the correct behavior of an application. I used Daikon, a tool to obtain dynamic likely invariants, and developed a method of observing these properties at runtime to verify the integrity. The integrity measurement component was implemented as a Python module on top of Volatility, a virtual machine introspection tool. My approach is a first step towards integrity attestation, using hypervisor-based introspection on RADIUM and a proof of concept of application-level measurement capability.
Maintaining Web Applications Integrity Running on RADIUM
Computer security attacks take place due to the presence of vulnerabilities and bugs in software applications. Bugs and vulnerabilities are the result of weak software architecture and lack of standard software development practices. Despite the fact that software companies are investing millions of dollars in the research and development of software designs security risks are still at large. In some cases software applications are found to carry vulnerabilities for many years before being identified. A recent such example is the popular Heart Bleed Bug in the Open SSL/TSL. In today’s world, where new software application are continuously being developed for a varied community of users; it’s highly unlikely to have software applications running without flaws. Attackers on computer system securities exploit these vulnerabilities and bugs and cause threat to privacy without leaving any trace. The most critical vulnerabilities are those which are related to the integrity of the software applications. Because integrity is directly linked to the credibility of software application and data it contains. Here I am giving solution of maintaining web applications integrity running on RADIUM by using daikon. Daikon generates invariants, these invariants are used to maintain the integrity of the web application and also check the correct behavior of web application at run time on RADIUM architecture in case of any attack or malware. I used data invariants and program flow invariants in my solution to maintain the integrity of web-application against such attack or malware. I check the behavior of my proposed invariants at run-time using Lib-VMI/Volatility memory introspection tool. This is a novel approach and proof of concept toward maintaining web application integrity on RADIUM.
Radium: Secure Policy Engine in Hypervisor
The basis of today’s security systems is the trust and confidence that the system will behave as expected and are in a known good trusted state. The trust is built from hardware and software elements that generates a chain of trust that originates from a trusted known entity. Leveraging hardware, software and a mandatory access control policy technology is needed to create a trusted measurement environment. Employing a control layer (hypervisor or microkernel) with the ability to enforce a fine grained access control policy with hyper call granularity across multiple guest virtual domains can ensure that any malicious environment to be contained. In my research, I propose the use of radium's Asynchronous Root of Trust Measurement (ARTM) capability incorporated with a secure mandatory access control policy engine that would mitigate the limitations of the current hardware TPM solutions. By employing ARTM we can leverage asynchronous use of boot, launch, and use with the hypervisor proving its state and the integrity of the secure policy. My solution is using Radium (Race free on demand integrity architecture) architecture that will allow a more detailed measurement of applications at run time with greater semantic knowledge of the measured environments. Radium incorporation of a secure access control policy engine will give it the ability to limit or empower a virtual domain system. It can also enable the creation of a service oriented model of guest virtual domains that have the ability to perform certain operations such as introspecting other virtual domain systems to determine the integrity or system state and report it to a remote entity.
Towards Resistance Detection in Health Behavior Change Dialogue Systems
One of the challenges fairly common in motivational interviewing is patient resistance to health behavior change. Hence, automated dialog systems aimed at counseling patients need to be capable of detecting resistance and appropriately altering dialog. This thesis focusses primarily on the development of such a system for automatic identification of patient resistance to behavioral change. This enables the dialogue system to direct the discourse towards a more agreeable ground and helping the patient overcome the obstacles in his or her way to change. This thesis also proposes a dialogue system framework for health behavior change via natural language analysis and generation. The proposed framework facilitates automated motivational interviewing from clinical psychology and involves three broad stages: rapport building and health topic identification, assessment of the patient’s opinion about making a change, and developing a plan. Using this framework patients can be encouraged to reflect on the options available and choose the best for a healthier life.
Unique Channel Email System
Email connects 85% of the world. This paper explores the pattern of information overload encountered by majority of email users and examine what steps key email providers are taking to combat the problem. Besides fighting spam, popular email providers offer very limited tools to reduce the amount of unwanted incoming email. Rather, there has been a trend to expand storage space and aid the organization of email. Storing email is very costly and harmful to the environment. Additionally, information overload can be detrimental to productivity. We propose a simple solution that results in drastic reduction of unwanted mail, also known as graymail.
Classifying Pairwise Object Interactions: A Trajectory Analytics Approach
Distributed Frameworks Towards Building an Open Data Architecture
Investigation on Segmentation, Recognition and 3D Reconstruction of Objects Based on LiDAR Data Or MRI
Segmentation, recognition and 3D reconstruction of objects have been cutting-edge research topics, which have many applications ranging from environmental and medical to geographical applications as well as intelligent transportation. In this dissertation, I focus on the study of segmentation, recognition and 3D reconstruction of objects using LiDAR data/MRI. Three main works are that (I). Feature extraction algorithm based on sparse LiDAR data. A novel method has been proposed for feature extraction from sparse LiDAR data. The algorithm and the related principles have been described. Also, I have tested and discussed the choices and roles of parameters. By using correlation of neighboring points directly, statistic distribution of normal vectors at each point has been effectively used to determine the category of the selected point. (II). Segmentation and 3D reconstruction of objects based on LiDAR/MRI. The proposed method includes that the 3D LiDAR data are layered, that different categories are segmented, and that 3D canopy surfaces of individual tree crowns and clusters of trees are reconstructed from LiDAR point data based on a region active contour model. The proposed method allows for delineations of 3D forest canopy naturally from the contours of raw LiDAR point clouds. The proposed model is suitable not only for a series of ideal cone shapes, but also for other kinds of 3D shapes as well as other kinds dataset such as MRI. (III). Novel algorithms for recognition of objects based on LiDAR/MRI. Aimed to the sparse LiDAR data, the feature extraction algorithm has been proposed and applied to classify the building and trees. More importantly, the novel algorithms based on level set methods have been provided and employed to recognize not only the buildings and trees, the different trees (e.g. Oak trees and Douglas firs), but also the subthalamus nuclei (STNs). By using the novel algorithms based ...
SEM Predicting Success of Student Global Software Development Teams
The extensive use of global teams to develop software has prompted researchers to investigate various factors that can enhance a team’s performance. While a significant body of research exists on global software teams, previous research has not fully explored the interrelationships and collective impact of various factors on team performance. This study explored a model that added the characteristics of a team’s culture, ability, communication frequencies, response rates, and linguistic categories to a central framework of team performance. Data was collected from two student software development projects that occurred between teams located in the United States, Panama, and Turkey. The data was obtained through online surveys and recorded postings of team activities that occurred throughout the global software development projects. Partial least squares path modeling (PLS-PM) was chosen as the analytic technique to test the model and identify the most influential factors. Individual factors associated with response rates and linguistic characteristics proved to significantly affect a team’s activity related to grade on the project, group cohesion, and the number of messages received and sent. Moreover, an examination of possible latent homogeneous segments in the model supported the existence of differences among groups based on leadership style. Teams with assigned leaders tended to have stronger relationships between linguistic characteristics and team performance factors, while teams with emergent leaders had stronger. Relationships between response rates and team performance factors. The contributions in this dissertation are three fold. 1) Novel analysis techniques using PLS-PM and clustering, 2) Use of new, quantifiable variables in analyzing team activity, 3) Identification of plausible causal indicators for team performance and analysis of the same.
Video Analytics with Spatio-Temporal Characteristics of Activities
Smartphone-based Household Travel Survey - a Literature Review, an App, and a Pilot Survey
High precision data from household travel survey (HTS) is extremely important for the transportation research, traffic models and policy formulation. Traditional methods of data collection were imprecise because they relied on people’s memories of trip information, such as date and location, and the remainder data had to be obtained by certain supplemental tools. The traditional methods suffered from intensive labor, large time consumption, and unsatisfactory data precision. Recent research trends to employ smartphone apps to collect HTS data. In this study, there are two goals to be addressed. First, a smartphone app is developed to realize a smartphone-based method only for data collection. Second, the researcher evaluates whether this method can supply or replace the traditional tools of HTS. Based on this premise, the smartphone app, TravelSurvey, is specially developed and used for this study. TravelSurvey is currently compatible with iPhone 4 or higher and iPhone Operating System (iOS) 6 or higher, except iPhone 6 or iPhone 6 plus and iOS 8. To evaluate the feasibility, eight individuals are recruited to participate in a pilot HTS. Afterwards, seven of them are involved in a semi-structured interview. The interview is designed to collect interviewees’ feedback directly, so the interview mainly concerns the users’ experience of TravelSurvey. Generally, the feedback is positive. In this study, the pilot HTS data is successfully uploaded to the server by the participants, and the interviewees prefer this smartphone-based method. Therefore, as a new tool, the smartphone-based method feasibly supports a typical HTS for data collection.
General Purpose Computing in Gpu - a Watermarking Case Study
The purpose of this project is to explore the GPU for general purpose computing. The GPU is a massively parallel computing device that has a high-throughput, exhibits high arithmetic intensity, has a large market presence, and with the increasing computation power being added to it each year through innovations, the GPU is a perfect candidate to complement the CPU in performing computations. The GPU follows the single instruction multiple data (SIMD) model for applying operations on its data. This model allows the GPU to be very useful for assisting the CPU in performing computations on data that is highly parallel in nature. The compute unified device architecture (CUDA) is a parallel computing and programming platform for NVIDIA GPUs. The main focus of this project is to show the power, speed, and performance of a CUDA-enabled GPU for digital video watermark insertion in the H.264 video compression domain. Digital video watermarking in general is a highly computationally intensive process that is strongly dependent on the video compression format in place. The H.264/MPEG-4 AVC video compression format has high compression efficiency at the expense of having high computational complexity and leaving little room for an imperceptible watermark to be inserted. Employing a human visual model to limit distortion and degradation of visual quality introduced by the watermark is a good choice for designing a video watermarking algorithm though this does introduce more computational complexity to the algorithm. Research is being conducted into how the CPU-GPU execution of the digital watermark application can boost the speed of the applications several times compared to running the application on a standalone CPU using NVIDIA visual profiler to optimize the application.
Autonomic Failure Identification and Diagnosis for Building Dependable Cloud Computing Systems
Ddos Defense Against Botnets in the Mobile Cloud
Performance Engineering of Software Web Services and Distributed Software Systems
The promise of service oriented computing, and the availability of Web services promote the delivery and creation of new services based on existing services, in order to meet new demands and new markets. As Web and internet based services move into Clouds, inter-dependency of services and their complexity will increase substantially. There are standards and frameworks for specifying and composing Web Services based on functional properties. However, mechanisms to individually address non-functional properties of services and their compositions have not been well established. Furthermore, the Cloud ontology depicts service layers from a high-level, such as Application and Software, to a low-level, such as Infrastructure and Platform. Each component that resides in one layer can be useful to another layer as a service. It hints at the amount of complexity resulting from not only horizontal but also vertical integrations in building and deploying a composite service. To meet the requirements and facilitate using Web services, we first propose a WSDL extension to permit specification of non-functional or Quality of Service (QoS) properties. On top of the foundation, the QoS-aware framework is established to adapt publicly available tools for Web services, augmented by ontology management tools, along with tools for performance modeling to exemplify how the non-functional properties such as response time, throughput, or utilization of services can be addressed in the service acquisition and composition process. To facilitate Web service composition standards, in this work we extended the framework with additional qualitative information to the service descriptions using Business Process Execution Language (BPEL). Engineers can use BPEL to explore design options, and have the QoS properties analyzed for the composite service. The main issue in our research is performance evaluation in software system and engineering. We researched the Web service computation as the first half of this dissertation, and performance antipattern ...
3GPP Long Term Evolution LTE Scheduling
Boosting for Learning From Imbalanced, Multiclass Data Sets
Design and Analysis of Novel Verifiable Voting Schemes
Simulating the Spread of Infectious Diseases in Heterogeneous Populations with Diverse Interactions Characteristics
The spread of infectious diseases has been a public concern throughout human history. Historic recorded data has reported the severity of infectious disease epidemics in different ages. Ancient Greek physician Hippocrates was the first to analyze the correlation between diseases and their environment. Nowadays, health authorities are in charge of planning strategies that guarantee the welfare of citizens. The simulation of contagion scenarios contributes to the understanding of the epidemic behavior of diseases. Computational models facilitate the study of epidemics by integrating disease and population data to the simulation. The use of detailed demographic and geographic characteristics allows researchers to construct complex models that better resemble reality and the integration of these attributes permits us to understand the rules of interaction. The interaction of individuals with similar characteristics forms synthetic structures that depict clusters of interaction. The synthetic environments facilitate the study of the spread of infectious diseases in diverse scenarios. The characteristics of the population and the disease concurrently affect the local and global epidemic progression. Every cluster’ epidemic behavior constitutes the global epidemic for a clustered population. By understanding the correlation between structured populations and the spread of a disease, current dissertation research makes possible to identify risk groups of specific characteristics and devise containment strategies that facilitate health authorities to improve mitigation strategies.
Modeling and Analysis of Next Generation 9-1-1 Emergency Medical Dispatch Protocols
Emergency Medical Dispatch Protocols are guidelines that a 9-1-1 dispatcher uses to evaluate the nature of emergency, resources to send and the nature of help provided to the 9-1-1 caller. The current Dispatch Protocols are based on voice only call. But the Next Generation 9-1-1 (NG9-1-1) architecture will allow multimedia emergency calls. In this thesis I analyze and model the Emergency Medical Dispatch Protocols for NG9-1-1 architecture. I have identified various technical aspects to improve the NG9-1-1 Dispatch Protocols. The devices (smartphone) at the caller end have advanced to a point where they can be used to send and receive video, pictures and text. There are sensors embedded in them that can be used for initial diagnosis of the injured person. There is a need to improve the human computer (smartphone) interface to take advantage of technology so that callers can easily make use of various features available to them. The dispatchers at the 9-1-1 call center can make use of these new protocols to improve the quality and the response time. They will have capability of multiple media streams to interact with the caller and the first responders.The specific contributions in this thesis include developing applications that use smartphone sensors. The CPR application uses the smartphone to help administer effective CPR even if the person is not trained. The application makes the CPR process closed loop, i.e., the person who administers the CPR as well as the 9-1-1 operator receive feedback and prompt from the application about the correctness of the CPR. The breathing application analyzes the quality of breathing of the affected person and automatically sends the information to the 9-1-1 operator. In order to improve the Human Computer Interface at the caller and the operator end, I have analyzed Fitts law and extended it so that it ...
Multilingual Word Sense Disambiguation Using Wikipedia
Ambiguity is inherent to human language. In particular, word sense ambiguity is prevalent in all natural languages, with a large number of the words in any given language carrying more than one meaning. Word sense disambiguation is the task of automatically assigning the most appropriate meaning to a polysemous word within a given context. Generally the problem of resolving ambiguity in literature has revolved around the famous quote “you shall know the meaning of the word by the company it keeps.” In this thesis, we investigate the role of context for resolving ambiguity through three different approaches. Instead of using a predefined monolingual sense inventory such as WordNet, we use a language-independent framework where the word senses and sense-tagged data are derived automatically from Wikipedia. Using Wikipedia as a source of sense-annotations provides the much needed solution for knowledge acquisition bottleneck. In order to evaluate the viability of Wikipedia based sense-annotations, we cast the task of disambiguating polysemous nouns as a monolingual classification task and experimented on lexical samples from four different languages (viz. English, German, Italian and Spanish). The experiments confirm that the Wikipedia based sense annotations are reliable and can be used to construct accurate monolingual sense classifiers. It is a long belief that exploiting multiple languages helps in building accurate word sense disambiguation systems. Subsequently, we developed two approaches that recast the task of disambiguating polysemous nouns as a multilingual classification task. The first approach for multilingual word sense disambiguation attempts to effectively use a machine translation system to leverage two relevant multilingual aspects of the semantics of text. First, the various senses of a target word may be translated into different words, which constitute unique, yet highly salient signal that effectively expand the target word’s feature space. Second, the translated context words themselves embed co-occurrence information ...
Privacy Management for Online Social Networks
One in seven people in the world use online social networking for a variety of purposes -- to keep in touch with friends and family, to share special occasions, to broadcast announcements, and more. The majority of society has been bought into this new era of communication technology, which allows everyone on the internet to share information with friends. Since social networking has rapidly become a main form of communication, holes in privacy have become apparent. It has come to the point that the whole concept of sharing information requires restructuring. No longer are online social networks simply technology available for a niche market; they are in use by all of society. Thus it is important to not forget that a sense of privacy is inherent as an evolutionary by-product of social intelligence. In any context of society, privacy needs to be a part of the system in order to help users protect themselves from others. This dissertation attempts to address the lack of privacy management in online social networks by designing models which understand the social science behind how we form social groups and share information with each other. Social relationship strength was modeled using activity patterns, vocabulary usage, and behavioral patterns. In addition, automatic configuration for default privacy settings was proposed to help prevent new users from leaking personal information. This dissertation aims to mobilize a new era of social networking that understands social aspects of human network, and uses that knowledge to honor users' privacy.
Qos Aware Service Oriented Architecture
Service-oriented architecture enables web services to operate in a loosely-coupled setting and provides an environment for dynamic discovery and use of services over a network using standards such as WSDL, SOAP, and UDDI. Web service has both functional and non-functional characteristics. This thesis work proposes to add QoS descriptions (non-functional properties) to WSDL and compose various services to form a business process. This composition of web services also considers QoS properties along with functional properties and the composed services can again be published as a new Web Service and can be part of any other composition using Composed WSDL.
Real-time Rendering of Burning Objects in Video Games
In recent years there has been growing interest in limitless realism in computer graphics applications. Among those, my foremost concentration falls into the complex physical simulations and modeling with diverse applications for the gaming industry. Different simulations have been virtually successful by replicating the details of physical process. As a result, some were strong enough to lure the user into believable virtual worlds that could destroy any sense of attendance. In this research, I focus on fire simulations and its deformation process towards various virtual objects. In most game engines model loading takes place at the beginning of the game or when the game is transitioning between levels. Game models are stored in large data structures. Since changing or adjusting a large data structure while the game is proceeding may adversely affect the performance of the game. Therefore, developers may choose to avoid procedural simulations to save resources and avoid interruptions on performance. I introduce a process to implement a real-time model deformation while maintaining performance. It is a challenging task to achieve high quality simulation while utilizing minimum resources to represent multiple events in timely manner. Especially in video games, this overwhelming criterion would be robust enough to sustain the engaging player's willing suspension of disbelief. I have implemented and tested my method on a relatively modest GPU using CUDA. My experiments conclude this method gives a believable visual effect while using small fraction of CPU and GPU resources.
Modeling Alcohol Consumption Using Blog Data
How do the content and writing style of people who drink alcohol beverages stand out from non-drinkers? How much information can we learn about a person's alcohol consumption behavior by reading text that they have authored? This thesis attempts to extend the methods deployed in authorship attribution and authorship profiling research into the domain of automatically identifying the human action of drinking alcohol beverages. I examine how a psycholinguistics dictionary (the Linguistics Inquiry and Word Count lexicon, developed by James Pennebaker), together with Kenneth Burke's concept of words as symbols of human action, and James Wertsch's concept of mediated action provide a framework for analyzing meaningful data patterns from the content of blogs written by consumers of alcohol beverages. The contributions of this thesis to the research field are twofold. First, I show that it is possible to automatically identify blog posts that have content related to the consumption of alcohol beverages. And second, I provide a framework and tools to model human behavior through text analysis of blog data.
Optimizing Non-pharmaceutical Interventions Using Multi-coaffiliation Networks
Computational modeling is of fundamental significance in mapping possible disease spread, and designing strategies for its mitigation. Conventional contact networks implement the simulation of interactions as random occurrences, presenting public health bodies with a difficult trade off between a realistic model granularity and robust design of intervention strategies. Recently, researchers have been investigating the use of agent-based models (ABMs) to embrace the complexity of real world interactions. At the same time, theoretical approaches provide epidemiologists with general optimization models in which demographics are intrinsically simplified. The emerging study of affiliation networks and co-affiliation networks provide an alternative to such trade off. Co-affiliation networks maintain the realism innate to ABMs while reducing the complexity of contact networks into distinctively smaller k-partite graphs, were each partition represent a dimension of the social model. This dissertation studies the optimization of intervention strategies for infectious diseases, mainly distributed in school systems. First, concepts of synthetic populations and affiliation networks are extended to propose a modified algorithm for the synthetic reconstruction of populations. Second, the definition of multi-coaffiliation networks is presented as the main social model in which risk is quantified and evaluated, thereby obtaining vulnerability indications for each school in the system. Finally, maximization of the mitigation coverage and minimization of the overall cost of intervention strategies are proposed and compared, based on centrality measures.
3D Reconstruction Using Lidar and Visual Images
Automated Classification of Emotions Using Song Lyrics
Automatic Tagging of Communication Data
Multi-perspective, Multi-modal Image Registration and Fusion
Multi-modal image fusion is an active research area with many civilian and military applications. Fusion is defined as strategic combination of information collected by various sensors from different locations or different types in order to obtain a better understanding of an observed scene or situation. Fusion of multi-modal images cannot be completed unless these two modalities are spatially aligned. In this research, I consider two important problems. Multi-modal, multi-perspective image registration and decision level fusion of multi-modal images. In particular, LiDAR and visual imagery. Multi-modal image registration is a difficult task due to the different semantic interpretation of features extracted from each modality. This problem is decoupled into three sub-problems. The first step is identification and extraction of common features. The second step is the determination of corresponding points. The third step consists of determining the registration transformation parameters. Traditional registration methods use low level features such as lines and corners. Using these features require an extensive optimization search in order to determine the corresponding points. Many methods use global positioning systems (GPS), and a calibrated camera in order to obtain an initial estimate of the camera parameters. The advantages of our work over the previous works are the following. First, I used high level-features, which significantly reduce the search space for the optimization process. Second, the determination of corresponding points is modeled as an assignment problem between a small numbers of objects. On the other side, fusing LiDAR and visual images is beneficial, due to the different and rich characteristics of both modalities. LiDAR data contain 3D information, while images contain visual information. Developing a fusion technique that uses the characteristics of both modalities is very important. I establish a decision-level fusion technique using manifold models.


Colliding galaxies may be common, but cosmic cacophony on this scale is still unusual. What we have here are two galaxies merging together in your standard collision...and then a third galaxy sidling in, just to complete the intergalactic chaos.

To get the full effect, you're going to want to click and expand the image to see it in much greater detail. A NASA astronomer adds:

Recorded in astronomer Halton Arp's Atlas of Peculiar Galaxies as Arp 272, the pair is otherwise known as NGC 6050 near center, and IC 1179 at upper right. A third galaxy, likely also a member of the interacting system, can be spotted above and left of larger spiral NGC 6050. They lie some 450 million light-years away in the Hercules Galaxy Cluster. At that estimated distance, the picture spans over 150 thousand light-years.


string(63) "Failed to connect to port 1028: No route to host" What Is Intranet Mjhs? - Okela

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Potentially the most important legal aspect of operating a business involves payroll reporting and regulations governing the funds transfer process to the Internal Revenue Service. The IRS does offer a certain amount of business management latitude to business owners who must collect payroll and social security taxes. However, sometimes business operators make the serious mistake of not transferring the deducted funds when the operation faces financial difficulties, including failure to meet the legal requirement of matching the FICA deductions for Social Security. This is a very slippery slope when managing a business, and solid attention should always be given to details concerning legal fiduciary responsibilities. The IRS is very serious about recovering these funds, and many times fines and even incarceration can be part of the final decision. That is why it is imperative to have an experienced and aggressive IRS tax relief attorney representing your case.

Management Authority

Many businesses operate by allowing specific employees to sign financial instruments and and have access to bank deposit information. In most instances, these documents will also be included in the Internal Revenue Service investigators report. In addition, these particular employees will more than likely be a potential target of the investigation. The question for the IRS is always centered around the level of authority and input regarding operational procedures and operating decisions. Sometimes general authority that does not distinctly address certain operational authority and can be a problem for employees who will also be investigated. An experienced IRS tax relief attorney will understand how to craft a defense that eliminates lower level employees. In general, the lower the level of authority the more likely the employee will be eliminated from the investigation. However, when certain material case factors can reveal other legal problems for the employee, then it is more likely they will still be included. The assumption of the IRS is that signatory power is also a general management authorization. The employee and the attorney must present case facts that prove the employee is not culpable.

Form 4180

The IRS investigator will do a considerable amount of case preparation before the actual formal hearing begins. Prior to a hearing the IRS will send a Form 4180 containing a list of “yes or no” questions that can directly implicate business owners, management officials, and authorized signatory employees. It is not uncommon for companies to assign responsibility for records and subsequent deposits and payroll tax transfers to human resource departments. Questions on the list are primarily directed at establishing exactly who is ultimately responsible for failure to report and transfer. When multiple employees are authorized to make payroll and tax fund reporting, confusion can occur when one employee is attempting to deflect attention away to others. Even though the form is essentially a list of definitive answer questions, written statements can also be entered into the record that prove where the true responsibility rests. Your IRS tax relief attorney will usually conduct a prior test that addresses the proper responses to Form 4180questions.

There are a few methods of handling an IRS tax debt investigation. The most preferable would completing the Form 4180 and delivering it to the IRS agent. The investigation component of the issue is really just a fact-finding practice before a final decision on culpability, potential fines, and a reimbursement schedule. The IRS rarely hands out incarceration penalties unless the failure to report was a premeditated decision. In addition, written statements and explanations can also be included with the form filing. A physical inspection of the documents the IRS is using as a case basis, such as bank drafts and cancelled checks, is also a good method of arriving at what actually happened. There is also an appeals process that allows 60 days to respond to an unfavorable IRS decision regarding the tax penalty. In addition, there is also a three year statute of limitations for completing the trust fund assessment and many times this time period can elapse in cases prosecuted on weak evidence.

It is important to remember that the IRS is usually just interested in the transfer of the funds in a timely and reasonable manner, even though they do have the authority to apply a significant penalty. Problems usually happen when there is little method of collecting funds when a business has failed to transfer funds while going out of business, and having a solid IRS tax relief attorney is vital.


EEG - Europolis Entertainment Group
EEG - Europolis Entertainment Group

2 UNLIMITED is a Dutch-based dance project founded in 1991 by Belgian producers Jean-Paul DeCoster and Phil Wilde and original fronted by Dutch rapper Ray Slijngaard and Dutch vocalist Anita Doth . During five years of enormous worldwide popularity, the act scored 16 chart hits and have sold over 18 million records worldwide to date. Although they enjoyed less mainstream notoriety in the United States, many of their songs have become popular themes at US sporting events, particularly in the NHL.

The current line-up Ray and Kim!

For any further information, so on date availability at your region/market and serious inquiries

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Why is it important to have a support system in pregnancy and birth?

Share the stress. Preg and postpartum are stressful and time consuming. Having someone to lift a little of the burden and let you know your doing a good job and you will be ok helps----a lot.
Support. Obviously for the emotional, psychological and therefore physical health of the mother, baby and family.


AMR Seminar with Andrew Singer

The OxIMP network met on Thursday for the first of this term's seminars. Andrew Singer, Senior Scientist at the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology started things off with a talk about antimicrobial resistance (AMR) in the wider environment, and what it means for environmental policy.

AMR is now widely recognised as a pressing concern for public health agencies worldwide. In the U.K. the government has prioritised policy responses that focus on surveillance, reducing infection, the prudent use of antibiotics, and education. However, current policy responses have largely been limited to "upstream" issues around the use of antibiotics, and have paid little attention to the "downstream" issues of AMR in the wider environment.

Andrew told us that 30-90% of the antibiotics we take are excreted into the sewage system. They tend to pass through the sewage system unaltered and enter the UK's rivers. Andrew's work (based on analyses of sediment in rivers) reveals that proximity to a sewage works explains up to 50% of the prevalence of AMR genes in a river - and this is despite the variable and weather-dependent effects of agricultural run-off.

EU regulation is based on the notion that the threshold for intervention is when the concentration of antibiotic is high enough to kill more than 5% of the bacteria present. The 5% threshold is an arbitrary risk assessment measure, is based on the assumption that bacteria in the environment will respond exactly as those in a laboratory (with no supporting evidence that this is true), and tells us nothing about what that concentration of antibiotics does in terms of selection pressure for resistance genes in bacteria. Recent research suggests that the "minimum selective concentration" (the amount of antibiotic required to provide a selective advantage to a resistant microbe relative to a nonresistant microbe) could be ten times lower than the 5% mortality threshold. On that measure, our rivers are in trouble. For example, looking at the Thames catchment,  three quarters of the rivers are "at risk" of quinolone (a type of antibiotic) resistance. If you wanted to reduce that level to say 10% of rivers having resistance pressures, current calculations using Andrew and his colleagues' model suggests that antibiotic use in humans would need to be reduced by as much as 80-88% - an unrealistic number in contemporary public health.

The scale of AMR selection pressures raises significant questions about how policy can address these environmental concerns - particularly when you also consider the selection pressures introduced to the environment by biocides in many different forms. Biocides act in a similar way to select for AMR in microbes, because resistance genes often confer 'co-resistance' and 'cross-resistance' (i.e. the group of genes, or single gene, that is selected for by resistance pressures confers resistance to both biocides and antibiotics). And in fact, the use of metals as biocides might by far more important in co-selecting for resistance in the environment than antibiotic use in humans and animals.

The missing link in this story is transmission of AMR bacteria from the environment to humans. This is much harder to show, and is a serious data gap at present- we just don't know how much AMR in the environment links to resistant bacterial infections in humans. There are some very credible reasons to suggest this link exists, and some clues towards transmission pathways, but Andrew suggested that at present the uncertainty itself is perhaps reason enough to invoke the precautionary principle.

After the talk, Andrew and members of the OxIMP network reconvened to discuss some of the issues raised by his fascinating talk, including reducing antibiotic and biocide usage, quantifying environmental transmission, rethinking sewage systems and pollution policy, and the prospects for long term sustainable health systems.

The next seminar in the series is on Wednesday 15th February with Hannah Landecker - more details are available here.


L. William Kazmierczak

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The traditional vulnerability parameter connectivity is the minimum number of nodes needed to be removed to disconnect a network. Likewise, edge connectivity is the minimum number of edges needed to be removed to disconnect. A disconnected network may still be viable if it contains a sufficiently large component. Component order connectivity and component(More)
UB3LYP/cc-pVTZ computations using C-PCM, IEF-PCM, and SMD water-solvent models have been performed for the reaction of the Hc atom with nitrous oxide (N2O) producing N2 and cOH in aqueous solution. The Hc atom attacks the oxygen atom in the N2O molecule resulting in the formation of the [H–ONN] transition state and its decomposition into cOH and N2. This(More)
The traditional parameter used as a measure of vulnerability of a network modeled by a graph with perfect nodes and edges that may fail is the edge connectivity λ. Of course , () p q K p λ = where p q ≤. In that case, failure of the network simply means that the surviving subgraph becomes disconnected upon the failure of individual edges. If, instead,(More)
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Stem Cell Facial

Imagine if you could unlock your skin’s potential to stay youthful? Smooth, radiant and healthy looking skin is now at your fingertips with the introduction of breakthrough skin rejuvenating stem cell facial.  At Anushka we’re always looking for and creating results driven face and skin treatments for our exclusive Palm Beach clients and our new Stem Cell facial is no different.

What are stem cells? Adult stem cells are found in many parts of the body such as the brain, bone marrow, fat, teeth, skin and hair follicles. Adult stem cells regenerate themselves naturally, under specific circumstances.   Researchers have discovered that properly formulated Age-Repair Defensins (synthetic growth factors), interacted with the skin’s master stem cells to create a wound healing effect.

The skin is equipped with a primitive immune system. When a disruption occurs, a stem cell located in the hair follicle goes into a cycle of self-renewal, triggered by defensins, naturally occurring messenger peptides. Defensins trigger the production of an abundance of keratinocytes. These keratinocytes migrate to the top, to form the skin’s barrier, protecting the skin against external aggression, preventing moisture loss and ensuring optimal skin health.

Credit: Defenage Skincare


Trust is a strange thing, isn’t it?

People have been asking me why Mr Smith and I trusted in the people and the practices we did. Why did we trust the medicine men before we’d even met them? Why did we trust in ayahuasca and not in chemotherapy?

What is trust anyway, and what does it mean to trust? With people, we usually confer our trust in proportion to their demonstration of the character traits we think of as trustworthy. We form a mental checklist: do they keep their promises? Can someone we already trust vouch for them? With methods, we might ask, what’s the track record? Are people seeing the results we want?

If those are the necessary conditions for trust, what were we thinking, Mr Smith and I, when we went to the Amazon in search of healing? We trusted people we’d never met, people we knew very little about and practices we’d never tested.

Well, we weren’t really thinking at all, by the time we set off. Somewhere along the line, we’d given up on that. Rational thought had only got us so far: when we thought through all the possibilities presented to us, they led us to places where we really didn’t want to go. So, we stopped thinking and relied more on our intuition instead.

I’ve always felt that thinking is a bit overrated anyway. How many of us have chosen our friends and lovers on that basis? No amount of data or deliberation can settle the things that matter most, and the decisions before us mattered more than most.

So it was intuition and not rational thought that led us into the jungle. It was the same intuition that had brought us together and kept us together. It wasn’t the people we didn’t know or the practices we hadn’t tried that we trusted – it was ourselves. It was our ability to write our story, our way, and before we wrote it, we had to allow ourselves to live it.

We didn’t have much information to base rational judgments on anyway. We didn’t know anyone in our situation who’d done what we went on to do, so there was no precedent to trust in and follow. In any case, there was no-one in the same situation as us – like all human experience, it was unique, and only generalizable up to a point. So, with only our intuition to guide us, we went forth with something of a pioneering spirit. The folks at home, watching and willing us to do well, needed something to trust in too, and thankfully, they trusted in us. They formed a fine team of cheerleaders, and nobody ever invoked a rational argument to question our judgment.

We didn't set out to be trailblazers. We were simply following our own path, trusting in our intuition to guide us along our chosen route. Some of those we met on the path have become very dear to us; others turned out to be people we wouldn’t have trusted had we known them better at the outset.

It’s just as well we didn’t know them better. It’s just as well we didn’t use the standard checklist of trustworthiness before we embarked on this adventure. That might have overridden our intuition and prevented us from trusting in our story. Because it’s the story, and not the characters, that deserves our trust. It’s the trusting in the story and in the living of it that brings us completion in the end.


No Increase In Water Rates In Bluewater, For Now

Bluewater councillors will be looking for input from residents on what to do with water and waste water costs, following the finalizing of the budget.

At a presentation this week from B. M. Ross,  council learned that the fees for waste water are not covering the operating costs. As a result, the municipality is dipping into reserves to cover that while the water rates are covering costs and creating a small surplus.

Mayor Tyler Hessel says a motion was passed to approve the report with no rate increase so they could renew their licence.

But shortly after the budget is finalized, the municipality would hold a public meeting to discuss water and waste-water rates in the future.


Heart Felt Lyrics 2 and Actual Love

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Language: English

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Size: 5.63 MB

Downloadable formats: PDF

This poses a very great dilemma for the person who wishes to criticize rock music: he can't find the biblical evidence necessary to condemn it. The beauty, as well as the productive quality, of the region to be planted, will be increased by blending the systems together, and uniting them at the same time with that of copse plantations, on which we are next about to make some remarks. dua,_ or copsewood destined to the axe, has been greatly improved by a discovery of our author, or, at least, a practice which he has been the first to recommend--- the propagating the oak, namely, by layering from the double shoot of young saplings.

Pages: 154

Publisher: AuthorHouse (April 28, 2014)

ISBN: 1496903013

Enrollment is limited to fifteen to twenty students, with preference given to entering freshmen , source: http://7xscoring.com/?books/k-pop-lyrics. What mattered here in the end was the form of delivery, and the energy produced by the live performance. What stood out for me was how the MC’s/rappers were freestyling in a localized Rastafarian style. The rhymes were leaning towards the early sound of reggae, but at a frenetic, locomotive speed contemporary of Drum ‘n’ Bass-syncopated, and in perfect staccato, with extreme cohesion between rhyme and beat http://gec.org.ru/?books/tributes-pay-days-poetry-vol-4-volume-4. The passable story is raised up by the incredible musical depth. Donockley's pipes and flutes really save this album, as they add a personality that would have been sorely missed. That, and the addition of violin and cello, makes for an ethnic metal sound that is hard to beat. Don't get me wrong, though, the input from the other musicians is impressive, too , cited: download epub. Some extrinsic motives are relatively heteronomous, representing what in SDT are described as controlled forms of motivation. For example, externally regulated behaviors are those performed to comply with externally administered reward and punishment contingencies pdf. The information here will be in a the form of a summary, and will not be very comprehensive in nature ref.: http://online-photo-editor.com/?ebooks/the-one-direction-music-test-how-well-do-you-know-there-music. Students read a wide variety of foundational texts from different time periods in conjunction with secondary critical studies to understand and call into question such long-established literary concepts such as period, genre, history, representation, and mode , e.g. http://es.genchina.com/lib/the-boy-in-the-song-the-true-stories-behind-50-rock-classics. This arrangement is suitable for beginner piano students who are comfortable reading on the staff notation and playing in the key of C gec.org.ru. Includes evaluation of styles in settings. Evolutionary processes give rise to diversity at every level of biological organisation, including species, individual organisms and molecules such as DNA and proteins. All life on earth is descended from a last universal ancestor that lived approximately 3.8 billion years ago. Repeated speciation and the divergence of life can be inferred from shared sets of biochemical and morphological traits, or by shared DNA sequences epub.

This page is best viewed in an up-to-date web browser with style sheets (CSS) enabled. While you will be able to view the content of this page in your current browser, you will not be able to get the full visual experience pdf. Do you first notice them grouping because of their shape or their size http://gec.org.ru/?books/living-lyrics? Mention should particularly be made here of two of Armstrong's other books, one on perception (1961), and one on bodily sensations, (1962). Armstrong thought of perception as coming to believe by means of the senses (compare also Pitcher 1971) , cited: http://gec.org.ru/?books/tributes-pay-days-poetry-vol-4-volume-4. Once you've chosen some chords, Hookpad can help you pick notes for your melody by highlighting the notes that are in the chords you've written gec.org.ru. Ethnomusicology, then, is currently in a phase of expansion and development wherein it is engaged in sorting out the kinds of studies of greatest importance to its development read online.
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Thursday, May 4, 2017

Leadership Characteristics That Are essential

Leadership Characteristics That Are valuable Today

Quality leadership is a indispensable asset found in every wealthy organizations. look at any well-to-do company, group, or committee, and you will find a talented leader at the back every of them. Many people ask the question, what makes a thriving leader? Is it a natural born talent, or is it something you can learn? Why accomplish some people inspire others to be augmented and make determined decisions, and others complete the opposite. Leadership skills are required of anyone who wishes to purchase a improved point of view at piece of legislation or any area in society. Some of the skills needed to be a great leader include: having sure communication skills, having a professional attitude, and beast assertive and friendly at the same time.These various characteristics of leadership are discussed in further detail below.

-To begin, it is important for a leader to have sure communication skills. He or she needs to helpfully indicate what tasks habit to be curtains and in imitation of they are due. Everyone needs to be on the similar page. A truly fine leader is next always manageable to discuss any questions that members of his or her team may have. He or she will create it certain what needs to be finished if an employee runs into trouble.

-Next, a fine leader is a great observer of people. This entails that he or she gets to know the personalities of every upon his or her team. The leader will know how to do something later hard employees just as capably as he or she would behind easy going ones. He or she will be relaxed at every times, even in the same way as things acquire tense.


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GoldenElephant is a half-blood witch. She wields a 11¼" Oak, Phoenix Feather wand, and is a member of the unsorted masses of Hogwarts students just off the train eagerly crowding around the Sorting Hat. Her favorite Harry Potter book is Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire and her .


Experimental eye research

MMP-9 inhibition facilitates amacrine cell loss after ouabain-induced retinal damage.

PMID 25752698

Retinal ischemia is a common risk factor for visual impairment and blindness. Two common changes after retinal ischemia are retinal ganglion cell (RGC) loss and Müller glial cell (MGC)-mediated endogenous repair. Matrix metalloproteinase 9 (MMP-9) has been shown to be responsible to RGC death. However, the effects of MMP-9 on the loss of other neurons and the reactivity of MGCs after retinal injury remain unclear. Ouabain, a Na/K-ATPase inhibitor, was injected into the vitreous body of rat eyes to induce cell death in the inner nuclear layer (INL). MMP-9 expression and activation in the retinas were examined by gelatin zymography and immunohistochemistry. The role of MMP-9 inhibitor (MMP-9i) in ouabain-treated retinas was assessed. After ouabain injection, there was an upregulation of MMP-9 activity in the inner retinas, and the activation of MMP-9 reached a maximum at 2 day. Unexpectedly, MMP-9i enhanced the thinning of the INL, the loss of Calbindin D-28k-positive cells and Syntaxin-positive amacrine cells (ACs) in the INL and decreased levels of Calbindin D-28k protein, while leaving the outer nuclear layer (ONL) unchanged. In addition, MMP-9i led to a minor increase in the number of BrdU positive cells that did not express GS in the INL. Collectively, these results revealed that the inhibition of MMP-9 activity facilitated AC loss and promoted the generation of MGC-derived cells in ouabain-treated retinas, which indicates that treating retinal diseases with drugs that inhibit MMP-9 activity should be considered with caution.


On her first return visit to Germany in 1950, Hannah Arendt went walking in the Black Forest with Martin Heidegger. They discussed revenge, forgiveness, and reconciliation. Upon her return to New York, Arendt began her diary of thoughts, her Denktagebuch. The first seven pages of Arendt's Denktagebuch argue that reconciliation—and not revenge or forgiveness—is an essential example of political judgment. The connection between reconciliation and judgment means that only reconciliation, and not revenge or forgiveness, can respond to wrongs in a way that fosters the political project of building and preserving a common world. This essay argues that the question—"Ought I to reconcile myself to the world?"—is, for Arendt, the pressing political question of our age.


10 May 2017

Why be conscious: The improbable origins of our unique mind

If we ask what consciousness is for, and why it evolved, we may get closer to understanding the nature of our own minds as well as those of other animals

eye artwork

Richard Wilkinson

YOU know that you are conscious. Hopefully, you believe me when I tell you that I am, too. But is your pet dog or cat conscious? What about a tool-making crow, or a “clairvoyant” octopus or a worm? You might think it is impossible to find out. There is no distinctive pattern of brain activity that indicates consciousness, and we can’t exactly ask animals about their experiences. We don’t even fully understand what consciousness is.

But maybe there’s a way to get a handle on it. What if we tracked consciousness to its origins? Then, instead of asking what consciousness is, we ask why it evolved – in other words, what is it for? Until recently, that question has been largely ignored. But now biologists are starting to feel their way around the tree of life to consider where, when and why something resembling consciousness emerged. Their research is proving surprisingly fruitful. It’s not just shedding light on animal minds, it is also providing insights into the very nature of consciousness.

This approach has its own difficulties. “Consciousness doesn’t leave any fossil record,” says Anil Seth, a neuroscientist at the University of Sussex, UK. So we have to infer its evolutionary history by comparing animals alive today and working back to what their common ancestor might have been able to do. And, because we don’t really know what we are looking for, we have to grope our way blindly around the evolutionary tree, with only our own experience of consciousness as a guide. Then, as we observe

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Science Quiz / Virology 5240 Final Exam

Random Science Quiz

Can you name the Virology 5240 Final Exam?

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Forced Order
Score 0/73 Timer 20:00
The protection of cells infected with an HAD- virus against HAD+ viruses is _____ Interference
The discoverers of IFN
The set of polyoma genes which promotes VP Production/Apoptosis when inserted into the cell as one continuous segment
They discovered Viral Splicing in Adenoviridae by hybridizing hexon gene mRNA to DNA and noticing the loop outs, which were introns
The strain of Herpes responsible for chicken pox/Varicella Zoster Virus
(True/False): Cells which receive more than one VP still produce IFN
A protein which, in the IFN induction pathway, forms an active dimer when it binds dsRNA and activates NFkB, leading to IFN production
Mouse Mx accumulates in the ___; Human Mx accumulates in the ___
This element bound by NFkB and then binds the ISRE in the nucleus to produce IFN action-related gene products
Herpes viruses produce proteins in three stages, each of which translocate to the nucleus to promote the production of the next stage; the first stage is called:
Molecule produced by Polyomaviruses which pushes cells to the S phase, needed for viral replication
This family of enveloped dsDNA viruses with icosahedral nucleocapsids may take up a latent state in their host, forming a lifelong association with the virus
A protein produced by flu viruses which suppresses IFN induction by 'sponge'ing up cellular TFs
New membrane is added to cells at these end segments, making these the areas where HA is most likely to first appear
These poxvirus proteins allow for viral replication
(True/False): Vaccinia can protect co-infecting viruses from IFN effects by inhibiting PKR
This 'fishing' technique was used to distinguish between the two hypotheses of how DIPs functioned
Vaccinia codes for a this protein, a homolog of part of eIF2-alpha, the main target of PKR
A compound which, when phosphorylated, mimics a nucleotide and terminates DNA synthesis; phosphorylated by a thymadine kinase present only in Herpes-infected cells
(True/False): Adding a VSV gene to a pox virus and infecting a human with it will result in Ab against VSV
The interaction between different IFN families in a cell is described as:
A name for the secreted virulence factors of pox viruses
It was discovered that dsRNA induced IFN through experiments with these complimentary RNA compounds (answer: nucleotide letters)
Molecule produced by Polyomaviruses which binds p53, preventing apoptosis, promoting transformation
Vaccinia codes for this protein, which mimics PKR's ability to bind dsRNA ; adding a Reovirus gene to a deletion mutant replicates this function
(True/False): Cells which receive one IP do not always produce a full IFN yield
Cells induced to produce IFN are also induced to produce this compound to degrade the dsRNA
The strain of Herpes which causes Mononucleosis in America, but causes Burkitt's Lymphoma in areas with endemic malaria
As IFN levels in the blood rose, the number of vaccine 'takes' for measles ____
A gene which is activated by IFN, the product of which binds the flu virus nucleocapsid, blocking transcription of the genome
IFN-gamma upregulates the ____ Transcription Factor for IFN-alpha/beta, thereby increasing their effectiveness
He infected mice with viruses and then injected them with anti-IFN, resulting in increased lethality and demonstrating the power of IFN
Even though two infected monolayers may have received the same number of viral particles, those which were passed at high multiplicity will cyclically result in fewer PFP due to:
1 Unit of IFN is defined as the amount which results in a __% reduction in plaque formation
(True/False):Poxviruses (dsDNA) induce IFN through mechanisms not involving dsRNA
A poxvirus used by Burnett to control the Australian rabbit population
A protein in the IFN action pathway which, when activated with dsRNA, produces a protein which dimerizes and activates RNAse L
(True/False):RNAse L preferentially degrades ssRNA which is closely associated with dsRNA
(True/False): Production of DIPs depends on co-infection of the cell with complete virus
Strains specific virus interference which occurs when viruses are continuously passed at high titers
A trisomy of this chromosome, which produces the IFN receptor, will result in increased effectiveness of IFN
IFN acts as a natural ____, stimulating slow antigen release and increased antibody production
According to target theory, polyoma transforming activity declines more slowly than IP activity because _______ is the only target for transformation inhibition:
Proteins (Transcription Factors) abundant in Herpes viruses which are coded for by the virus
Latent Herpes RNA forms this shape in the nucleus of infected neurons:
This compound can separate HeLa cells from a plate while leaving the underlying HA molecules attached to be visualized
(True/False): Even if a cell is infected with an del-NS1 mutant, infection levels will remain high if the host lacks the PKR gene
The largest family of conventional viruses, these dsDNA viruses code for over 100 proteins and contain many TFs and Defense Mechanisms
The NS1 protein interacts with the polymerase complex, preventing its function
The set of polyoma genes which promotes transformation when inserted into the cell as one continuous segment
DIPs may be separated from PFPs with this technique, involving a sucrose density gradient
When chicken IFN was reverse transcribed into green monkey kidney cells and sequenced, the protein was found to have __ cysteines and __ glycsylation sites
IFN Receptors function via _____ pathways, ultimately phosphorylating IkB and thus activating NFkB
These poxvirus proteins produce a second stage uncoating; others exit the cell and stimulate adjacent cell growth; DNA not yet replicating
Outbreaks of this virus demonstrate the dangers other poxviruses pose in a world where no one is immune to smallpox, as poxviruses have common Ags provideing blanket pox immunity
This type of transcription of PFP RNA produces enough capsid proteins for DIP export in the absence of secondary transcription
Influenza DIPs disrupt replication because of a defective _____ subunit which outcompetes the normal protein
Interferon secondary structure contains 5 of these elements
Sustained Large T Antigen production is necessary to maintain a transformed cell, leading to a continuously fluorescent ______ when the LTA is GFP-tagged
(True/False): IFN Suppressing viruses are less sensitive to IFN action
A family of dsDNA viruses with circular supercoiled DNA wrapped around cellular histones
Poxviruses are fairly resistant to Antibody because they exit cells by _____, passing immediately into adjacent cells
(True/False): Interferon production in chicken embryos increases with time
Adenoviruses have this gene, which produces small dsRNA molecules that bind but do not activate PKR
The incredible stability of Herpesviridae allows for this technique to track the source of the infection
A homolog of the IFN-gamma receptor produced by myxoma virus, which reduces sensitivity to IFN
In the IFN action pathway, elevated PKR levels remain latent until dsRNA is present, at which point it phosphorylates __, stopping translation
NS1 (which also sequesters dsRNA) deletion mutants are equally sensitive to IFN action, but produce ___ IFN than normal virus
DIPs form in VSV because of a 5' end of the -RNA strand which transcribes a portion of the ___ gene, which then binds cellular transcriptase at high affinity
Herpes viruses produce these as a defense mechanism against IFN Action:
By infecting cells with a virus without a CPE (HAD-), waiting, and then challenging them with a virus with a CPE (HAD+), these appear on the plate
The most efficient inducer of IFN is a DIP of this virus
HPV (a polyomavirus) vaccines (against types 15+18) are made by inducing this organism to produce empty viral capsids

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how to be a good father: a guide not written by ozai

Araeph’s Greatest Hits, Vol. 2

Vol. 1 here.

It’s Araeph’s 1000th post! Thank you so much to all my followers, people who’ve messaged me for discussion, and fans who’ve filled my inbox with such thought-provoking asks. Below is the latest master list of my essays and fiction that I’ve compiled over the past year or so, as well as a few choice reblogs from other tumblr users that are mentioned by name. Have a fantastic 4th of July, everyone!

Fic Recs

A:TLA Friendship Recs
Favorite Zutara writers

Araeph’s fics

Hatchling, Part 1
Spitting Image, Part 1
Breath of Fire
Love Is a Marathon
Defiance, Part 1
Defiance, Part 2
Defiance, Part 3
Defiance, Part 4
Defiance, Part 5
Defiance, Part 6
Defiance, Part 7
Defiance, Part 8

Other Meta

Araeph’s fandoms
Mulan: contrasting messages in pop song vs. theatrical song
The arranged marriage plot in Mulan 2
Mulan and Shang: military dynamics vs. a relationship
What did you think of the Red John arc in The Mentalist?
Was the Jane/Lisbon pairing in The Mentalist treated well?
Did Lizzy marry Darcy for his money?
What advice do you have for up-and-coming authors?
What do you think makes a good romance?
Are there particular directors you gravitate towards?

Steven Universe Criticism

What are your favorite critiques of Steven Universe?
Who did Pearl belong to before she joined the Crystal Gems?
How Pearl responds to toughness vs. niceness
Can autism explain Pearl’s behavior toward Greg?
What do you think of Pearl’s character and her treatment of Steven?
Are there similarities between Aang and Pearl’s clinginess to their partners?
The Diamonds: taking “compassion for one’s adversaries” too far
What do you think of the “Rose is Pink Diamond” theory?
Rainbow Quartz: requited love
I miss the way they used to draw Peridot
The decline of Steven Universe

A:TLA Gen Criticism

I just don’t know how to feel about Bryke!
How do you keep A:TLA’s flaws from ruining the show for you?
Should Teo, Haru, and The Duke have had bigger roles in Book 3?
Should there have been a scene where Aang mourns the dead at the end of Book 3?
The structure of the first half of Book 3
Is energybending Ozai enough to delegitimize his rule?
Could Aang lying to the tribes in “The Great Divide” have been handled better?
Was the Fire Nation secretly looking for the Avatar in the Southern Water Tribe?
Parallels between the Fire Nation Royal Family and the SWT chief family
Does the GAang idealize their parents and mentors too much?
The significance of Momo
How did the characters age visually throughout A:TLA?
Was Ozai an abusive spouse as well as father?
Do you think the Avatar universe has a legitimate afterlife?
Detachment and unlocking the chakras
Avatar cosmology @peacockarehot
What happens before each Avatar is old enough to master the elements?
How well was the challenge of being the Avatar told in A:TLA and LOK?

A:TLA’s Four Nations

Four Nations and childhood education
Four Nations’ view of sex and gender roles
Four Nations: a food contest analysis
Four Nations eye color
What is the best way for the SWT to develop?
What is your opinion on Water Tribe betrothal necklaces?
Why an earthbender shouldn’t be able to lavabend alone
Is the Earth Kingdom united under a cohesive value?
What is your opinion on the Air Nomad council of elders?
Did the Air Nomads get shortchanged in development?
Is Ty Lee an untrained airbender?
What kind of benders would mixed heritage kids be?
Could firebenders draw power from the Earth’s core?
Can waterbenders heat water to create steam? Part 1
Can waterbenders heat water to create steam? Part 2
What is your favorite nation and what type of bender would you be?
Who are your favorite minor characters from all four nations?

Alternative A:TLA Finale and Book 4 Speculation

Zutara would have been a better bookend, even with only 3 books
How would the Book 3 Zutara moments change with Book 4?
What should have been the theme of the A:TLA finale?
What do you find disappointing about the A:TLA finale?
Aaron Ehaz’s plan for A:TLA and beyond @kataraaandzuko @terminaschosenone
Anything you would like to see from an A:TLA sequel?
How do you see the relationships of the Gaang progressing through adulthood?
How would hidden airbenders have been revealed?
Koh in Book 4

A:TLA Comics Criticism

Rosy colonialism in “The Promise”
“North and South” : a settler’s fantasy  @fireladykatara
“North and South” and the issue of progress
The A:TLA comics do not follow A:TLA’s visual style
Bryke’s interference in the comics
What do you think of the role the Air Acolytes played in the comics?

Legend of Korra criticism

A:TLA vs. LOK: simple vs. complex beginnings
LOK and inconsistent bending origins
Which element is the hardest for an Avatar to learn?
How would you write Korra’s development in Books 1-4?
Mary Suyin
How would you write Suyin Beifong?
Suyin: complex vs. annoying characterization
Zaheer and compelling belief systems
Is Zaheer Korra’s foil?
Thoughts on the Red Lotus
What do you think of the concept of Raava and Vaatu?
What do you think are the most well developed secondary characters in LOK?
Varrick, Zhu Li, and abuse
Could Makorra have become compatible?
Bolin and Lavabending
What do you think about the Dai Li surviving into the era of LOK?
Bumi and Air Nomad colors
Bryke’s extreme responses to fan theories
How would a sequel to Legend of Korra play out?

Zutara Meta

A:TLA non-canon shippers keep A:TLA fandom afloat
Zuko and Katara: Color symbolism in “Cave of Two Lovers” @marsreds
Zuko and Katara: character parallels
Zutara is toxic and unhealthy!” (again)
Zuko and Katara, twin flames @peacockarehot
Zutara parallels with Darcy and Elizabeth
Zutara parallels with Beauty and the Beast
Blue Spirit/Painted Lady parallels
The Blue Spirit vs. the Painted Lady
Were the Blue Spirit and Painted Lady connected?
How Zuko shows respect when saving Katara from falling rocks @theadamantdaughter
Zuko and Katara’s parenting styles
Zuko jumping in front of lightning was sacrificial
What would young viewers learn from Zutara?
On Zuko interacting more with the GAang
Thoughts on School Time Shipping

“What Would [X] Gain from Zutara?”
Ursa and Kiyi
The Fire Nation and Water Tribes
The cabbage merchant

Kataang Criticism

Irrefutable proof that Kataang was NOT always going to be canon @peacockarehot
Do you think Katara felt some pressure to date Aang?
Kataang and unwanted advances (with @theadamantdaughter)
Aang’s possessive behavior toward Katara @theadamantdaughter
Why Aang’s behavior in “Love Is a Battlefield” is dangerous
Love vs. attachment
Does Aang respect Katara?
Why “The Fortuneteller” is anti-Kataang
Fanon Kataang vs. canon Kataang
Could Katara and Aang still be happy together?
Katara is aged down in scenes with Aang
Kataang and the magic aging (with @jasubb-8)
Does Aang’s age excuse his unwanted advances?
What if Katara couldn’t give Aang an airbender?
Will-they-won’t-they and Kataang
Aang’s romances vs. Sokka’s romances @peacockarehot
Kataang’s lack of substance in “The Headband”
Kataang’s lack of substance in “The Cave of Two Lovers”

Maiko Criticism

Would Ty Mai be more compatible than Maiko?
Ty Mai and understanding each other
Were Zuko and Mai’s relations consensual? with @theadamantdaughter
Why Maiko is prime for failure @peacockarehot
Maiko, Zutara, and Conflict @theadamantdaughter
The pitfalls of Maiko @peacockarehot
Is Maiko or Kataang worse?
Is Maiko or Kataang worse? – part 2
Why do Maiko shippers ignore the problems in their ship?
Mai never dated the real Zuko
Pros and Cons of Maiko

Character Analysis

How would you have written Aang’s character development from Books 1-3?
Aang exalting Air Nomad culture above everyone else’s
Should Aang’s introspection have followed Buddhist tenets more closely?
Rewriting energybending to improve Aang’s character @terminaschosenone
Should Aang have had a more prominent teacher or guide?
Do you think Aang’s grief at the loss of the Air Nomads was properly presented?
Why was Aang not worried about killing Ozai on the Day of Black Sun?
Aang vs. the vulture wasp
Aang’s reaction to the other Avatars’ advice
Aang’s reaction to Yangchen’s advice
Aang’s response to Jetara
Aang’s anger vs. Katara’s
Did Aang truly exhibit contrition for the EIP kiss?
How Aang idealizes Katara
Did Aang really know how Katara felt because of his own loss?
Who would be a good match for Aang?

Could the dragons heal Azula?
Do you think any little part of Azula ever loved Zuko?
Azula’s motivations for the lightning strike
Azula’s motivations for the lightning strike, Part 2
Would Katara feel a moral obligation to help Azula post-A:TLA?
How would Azula have compelled Mai to go with her initially if Mai had refused?

Iroh’s character journey
Do Iroh’s values align better with Mai’s or Katara’s?
Maiko shipper bashes Iroh and Zuko
Zuko and Iroh’s relationship parallels with Jim Hawkins and Long John Silver

Katara and her emotional iceberg
Katara would have been more independent if she’d married Zuko
Katara puts her emotional needs in front of Aang’s
Katara is abandoned at the South Pole
Katara crying over Aang vs. Zuko
Did Katara’s character development stall?
Should Katara have been at the Boiling Rock?
Should Katara have forgiven Zuko earlier?
Katara lashing out at Sokka during Southern Raiders
How do you think Kya would feel about the Southern Raiders?
Would it have been in character for Katara to murder Yon Rha?
Why does Katara’s character become so irrelevant? @zuzusexytiems
Why Katara is not a Mary Sue @daughter-of-water @theadamantdaughter
Why do people continually try to make excuses for Katara not fighting in LOK?

What would Mai’s ideal character arc be?
Mai doesn’t understand Zuko’s values @honxrable
What personality would be best for Mai’s partner?
Was Mai originally going to be a villain?
Is there any evidence that Mai was scared of Azula?
Debunking Mai’s affection for Tom-Tom

Sokka’s quest to be a man
On Sokka seeing Katara’s face instead of his mother’s
Sokka’s protective nature

Could Toph and her parents reconcile?
Toph and law enforcement

Is Zuko emotionally unstable?
How would Zuko handle the issue of bloodbending?
Was Zuko more open in Book 2 or Book 3?
Hair cutting symbolism in A:TLA
Do you think Zuko has PTSD?
Zuko and Aang’s relationship
Locations of Zuko’s Agni Kais and their significance
The symbolism of Zuko’s scar
Zuko is not stoic (@honxrable)
Why I Feel Zuko’s Betrayal Was to End Zutara @peacockarehot
Piandao as Zuko’s mentor


We’re always waiting for our lives to begin, figuring we’ll be someone else someday. But what are we waiting for? All we have is now.
—  One Tree Hill
If you’re always looking for reasons not to be with somebody, then you’ll always find them. At some point, you should let go and give your heart what it deserves.
—  One Tree Hill
Sometimes I feel like I need to talk to every single person that's going to start watching OTH

And I need to tell them to not fall in love with Brucas. DON’T DO IT. Because it will hurt you, even years later. You will never get over that ship, even if you go into the show knowing what’s going to happen and you think you’ll be okay with it.

Is the perfection of Brucas for the short time we had it worth the incredible pain of losing them completely?

Sometimes I’m not sure it is.

The boy saw the comet and he felt as though his life had meaning. And when it went away, he waited his entire life for it to come back to him… It was more than just a comet because of what it brought to his life: direction, beauty, meaning. There are many who couldn’t understand, and sometimes he walked among them. But even in his darkest hours, he knew in his heart that someday it would return to him, and his world would be whole again… And his belief in God and love and art would be re-awakened in his heart.
—  Lucas Scott ‘The Comet’

but sometimes they come back