Fusion features ensembling models using Siamese convolutional neural network for kinship verification

Family is one of the most important entities in the community. Mining the genetic information through facial images is increasingly being utilized in wide range of real-world applications to facilitate family members tracing and kinship analysis to become remarkably easy, inexpensive, and fast as compared to the procedure of profiling Deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA). However, the opportunities of building reliable models for kinship recognition are still suffering from the insufficient determination of the familial features, unstable reference cues of kinship, and the genetic influence factors of family features. This research proposes enhanced methods for extracting and selecting the effective familial features that could provide evidences of kinship leading to improve the kinship verification accuracy through visual facial images. First, the Convolutional Neural Network based on Optimized Local Raw Pixels Similarity Representation (OLRPSR) method is developed to improve the accuracy performance by generating a new matrix representation in order to remove irrelevant information. Second, the Siamese Convolutional Neural Network and Fusion of the Best Overlapping Blocks (SCNN-FBOB) is proposed to track and identify the most informative kinship clues features in order to achieve higher accuracy. Third, the Siamese Convolutional Neural Network and Ensembling Models Based on Selecting Best Combination (SCNN-EMSBC) is introduced to overcome the weak performance of the individual image and classifier. To evaluate the performance of the proposed methods, series of experiments are conducted using two popular benchmarking kinship databases; the KinFaceW-I and KinFaceW-II which then are benchmarked against the state-of-art algorithms found in the literature. It is indicated that SCNN-EMSBC method achieves promising results with the average accuracy of 92.42% and 94.80% on KinFaceW-I and KinFaceW-II, respectively. These results significantly improve the kinship verification performance and has outperformed the state-of-art algorithms for visual image-based kinship verification

Faculty ritual, solidarity, and cohesion: Thirty-five years of change at Eastern Mennonite University

This historical case study of Eastern Mennonite University faculty between 1965 and 2000 explored the shifts in social bonds, examined through the concept of ritual (Collins, 2004), concurrent with cultural, social, environmental, and professional forces that impacted the institution. Employing the concepts of cohesion (as the specific other) and solidarity (as the general other) (Mead, 1934) provided a distinction between individual relational networks and the shared ideological commitments that bound faculty together.;Results of the study demonstrated the significance of intrinsic motivators on faculty hiring, persistence, and perceptions of institutional purpose and employment desirability. Physical space (as the place of assembly) and metaphysical space (as the sense of relational or conceptual connection) emerged as significant frames to understand social bond change. Physical faculty dispersal due to campus sprawl contributed to a reduced sense of relational closeness, making opportunities for cross-disciplinary social and task interaction increasingly important.;The terms of social bonds changed concurrent with the shift from strong to weak ties (Granovetter, 1973; Lindenberg, 1998). The strongly-tied religious, educational, and ethnic Mennonite community of the 1960s contained many mutually-reinforcing rituals. The shift toward weak ties was brought on by the professionalization and diversification of faculty, the reinterpretation of Mennonite values and beliefs, and other internal and external forces. The effect was a de-emphasis on ethnic Mennonite rituals as the source of cohesion, and an increased emphasis on educational task rituals. However, social connections established despite difference provided significant new bases for solidarity and cohesion in a professionalized religious community

Ethnographies of Waiting

This book is open access and available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. It is funded by Knowledge Unlatched. We all wait – in traffic jams, passport offices, school meal queues, for better weather, an end to fighting, peace. Time spent waiting produces hope, boredom, anxiety, doubt, or uncertainty. Ethnographies of Waiting explores the social phenomenon of waiting and its centrality in human society. Using waiting as a central analytical category, the book investigates how waiting is negotiated in myriad ways. Examining the politics and poetics of waiting, Ethnographies of Waiting offers fresh perspectives on waiting as the uncertain interplay between doubting and hoping, and asks "When is time worth the wait?" Waiting thus conceived is intrinsic to the ethnographic method at the heart of the anthropological enterprise. Featuring detailed ethnographies from Japan, Georgia, England, Ghana, Norway, Russia and the United States, a Foreword by Craig Jeffrey and an Afterword by Ghassan Hage, this is a vital contribution to the field of anthropology of time and essential reading for students and scholars in anthropology, sociology and philosophy

Ethnographies of Waiting

This book is open access and available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. It is funded by Knowledge Unlatched. We all wait – in traffic jams, passport offices, school meal queues, for better weather, an end to fighting, peace. Time spent waiting produces hope, boredom, anxiety, doubt, or uncertainty. Ethnographies of Waiting explores the social phenomenon of waiting and its centrality in human society. Using waiting as a central analytical category, the book investigates how waiting is negotiated in myriad ways. Examining the politics and poetics of waiting, Ethnographies of Waiting offers fresh perspectives on waiting as the uncertain interplay between doubting and hoping, and asks "When is time worth the wait?" Waiting thus conceived is intrinsic to the ethnographic method at the heart of the anthropological enterprise. Featuring detailed ethnographies from Japan, Georgia, England, Ghana, Norway, Russia and the United States, a Foreword by Craig Jeffrey and an Afterword by Ghassan Hage, this is a vital contribution to the field of anthropology of time and essential reading for students and scholars in anthropology, sociology and philosophy

Expressive metrics : the context and development of some prosodic principles in the poetry of Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot, 1908-1915.

SIGLEAvailable from British Library Document Supply Centre-DSC:DXN004830 / BLDSC - British Library Document Supply CentreGBUnited Kingdo

An inductive investigation into relationships between geographically co-located actors : the contribution of relationship marketing to regional competitiveness

This thesis is grounded in the discipline of marketing and draws, substantively, on literature from within the regarded sub-discipline of relationship marketing. However, the literature drawn upon is firmly interdisciplinary, drawing heavily on theories from economic geography. The crucial construct drawn from this outwith literature is that of geographic co- location, the phenomenon of geographic proximity between businesses and other organisations. This thesis isolates and defines two modes of regional marketing activity, a defensive and an offensive variant. It is to the defensive variant that this thesis makes contributions by proposing a macro theory of relevant marketing geography, a regional relationship lifecycle that examines the notion of loyalty to a region and a competence-based view of regional relationship marketing activity between co-located actors. The conclusions and models presented here mark the first thesis in the discipline of marketing examining the contribution of the marketing discipline to regional competitiveness. The thesis also deploys a novel methodology within the marketing discipline to understand the research phenomena in time and space, and in terms of agency and structure. The methodology developed for, and deployed in, this thesis is based on Anthony Giddens' theory of structuration

Becoming Artifacts: Medieval Seals, Passports and the Future of Digital Identity

What does a digital identity token have to do with medieval seals? Is the history of passports of any use for enabling the discovery of Internet users\u27 identity when crossing virtual domain boundaries during their digital browsing and transactions? The agility of the Internet architecture and its simplicity of use have been the engines of its growth and success with the users worldwide. As it turns out, there lies also its crux. In effect, Internet industry participants have argued that the critical problem business is faced with on the Internet is the absence of an identity layer from the core protocols of its logical infrastructure. As a result, the cyberspace parallels a global territory without any identification mechanism that is reliable, consistent and interoperable across domains. This dissertation is an investigation of the steps being taken by Internet stakeholders in order to resolve its identity problems, through the lenses of historical instances where similar challenges were tackled by social actors. Social science research addressing the Internet identity issues is barely nascent. Research on identification systems in general is either characterized by a paucity of historical perspective, or scantily references digital technology and online identification processes. This research is designed to bridge that gap. The general question at its core is: How do social actors, events or processes enable the historical emergence of authoritative identity credentials for the public at large? This work is guided by that line of inquiry through three broad historical case studies: first, the medieval experience with seals used as identity tokens in the signing of deeds that resulted in transfers of rights, particularly estate rights; second, comes the modern, national state with its claim to the right to know all individuals on its territory through credentials such as the passport or the national identity card; and finally, viewed from the United States, the case of ongoing efforts to build an online digital identity infrastructure. Following a process-tracing approach to historical case study, this inquiry presents enlightening connections between the three identity frameworks while further characterizing each. We understand how the medieval doctrines of the Trinity and the Eucharist developed by schoolmen within the Church accommodated seals as markers of identity, and we understand how the modern state seized on the term `nationality\u27 - which emerged as late as in the 19th century - to make it into a legal fiction that was critical for its identification project. Furthermore, this investigation brings analytical insights which enable us to locate the dynamics driving the emergence of those identity systems. An ordering of the contributing factors in sequential categories is proposed in a sociohistorical approach to explain the causal mechanisms at work across these large phenomena. Finally this research also proposes historically informed projections of scenarios as possible pathways to the realization of authoritative digital identity. But that is the beginning of yet another story of identity

The Hunt for Lost Blood: Nazi Germanization Policy in Occupied Europe

Throughout the Second World War, the National Socialist regime enacted a wide-ranging campaign to enhance the German nation by assimilating conquered populations into its demographic structure. At the axis of this multifaceted enterprise stood the Re-Germanization Procedure, or WED – a special program designed to absorb “racially valuable” foreigners into the German body politic by sending them to live with host families in the very heart of the Third Reich. The following dissertation provides the first ever study of the Re-Germanization Procedure and examines the momentous influence this initiative exerted over Nazi policy-making in occupied Europe. It is a story of the nexus between popular opinion on the home front and imperialism abroad, a fresh inquiry into the dynamics of German rule and their basis in the experiences of ordinary human beings, a kaleidoscopic portrait detailing a signature aspect of the National Socialist era that has largely eluded the scrutiny of historical analysis. The WED created a space where German and non-German civilians could articulate their understandings of race, community, and national belonging from within the settings of everyday life. Drawing on methodological tools from the fields of critical race studies and postcolonial theory, my research probes the extraordinary degree to which their interactions with state actors, and with each other, helped shape the classification of indigenous peoples across the length and breadth of Hitler’s empire – a place where identity politics often meant the difference between life and death. By situating this process within a global context of nation-building and colonialism, my project reveals an unfamiliar side of an infamous epoch in order to show how, under the wartime Third Reich, discourses of race came to function not just as an impetus for genocidal violence, but as a transformative framework of inclusion