Honor Killing Attitudes Among San Jose State University Students

This study examines honor killing attitudes amongst a sample of sixty graduate and undergraduate students in the Department of Justice Studies at San Jose State University and offers a systematic review of published academic literature on honor killings. It hypothesizes that students who strongly adhere to patriarchal traditionalism are more likely to endorse legitimacy of honor killings, controlling for gender, education, family size, religion, religiosity/religious conviction, and female chastity expectations. Descriptive findings suggest that the majority of respondents disagree that honor murders are justified, regardless of circumstances, dependent variable honor killing attitudes. Respondents also report negative attitudes toward authority and obedience, resistance to change, and patriarchal entitlements, independent variable patriarchal traditionalism. Female respondents report stronger opposition to honor killings and patriarchal traditionalism than males, which is in agreement with results of existing research; respondents’ gender explains some of the variance in attitudes toward honor killings. The study’s limited sampling parameters do not allow for generalization of calculated statistical data and results. Implications and further research suggestions are discussed

Scan and paint: theory and practice of a sound field visualization method

Sound visualization techniques have played a key role in the development of acoustics throughout history. The development of measurement apparatus and techniques for displaying sound and vibration phenomena has provided excellent tools for building understanding about specific problems. Traditional methods, such as step-by-step measurements or simultaneous multichannel systems, have a strong tradeoff between time requirements, flexibility, and cost. However, if the sound field can be assumed time stationary, scanning methods allow us to assess variations across space with a single transducer, as long as the position of the sensor is known. The proposed technique, Scan and Paint, is based on the acquisition of sound pressure and particle velocity by manually moving a P-U probe (pressure-particle velocity sensors) across a sound field whilst filming the event with a camera. The sensor position is extracted by applying automatic color tracking to each frame of the recorded video. It is then possible to visualize sound variations across the space in terms of sound pressure, particle velocity, or acoustic intensity. In this paper, not only the theoretical foundations of the method, but also its practical applications are explored such as scanning transfer path analysis, source radiation characterization, operational deflection shapes, virtual phased arrays, material characterization, and acoustic intensity vector field mapping

An overview of recent research results and future research avenues using simulation studies in project management

This paper gives an overview of three simulation studies in dynamic project scheduling integrating baseline scheduling with risk analysis and project control. This integration is known in the literature as dynamic scheduling. An integrated project control method is presented using a project control simulation approach that combines the three topics into a single decision support system. The method makes use of Monte Carlo simulations and connects schedule risk analysis (SRA) with earned value management (EVM). A corrective action mechanism is added to the simulation model to measure the efficiency of two alternative project control methods. At the end of the paper, a summary of recent and state-of-the-art results is given, and directions for future research based on a new research study are presented

STV-based Video Feature Processing for Action Recognition

In comparison to still image-based processes, video features can provide rich and intuitive information about dynamic events occurred over a period of time, such as human actions, crowd behaviours, and other subject pattern changes. Although substantial progresses have been made in the last decade on image processing and seen its successful applications in face matching and object recognition, video-based event detection still remains one of the most difficult challenges in computer vision research due to its complex continuous or discrete input signals, arbitrary dynamic feature definitions, and the often ambiguous analytical methods. In this paper, a Spatio-Temporal Volume (STV) and region intersection (RI) based 3D shape-matching method has been proposed to facilitate the definition and recognition of human actions recorded in videos. The distinctive characteristics and the performance gain of the devised approach stemmed from a coefficient factor-boosted 3D region intersection and matching mechanism developed in this research. This paper also reported the investigation into techniques for efficient STV data filtering to reduce the amount of voxels (volumetric-pixels) that need to be processed in each operational cycle in the implemented system. The encouraging features and improvements on the operational performance registered in the experiments have been discussed at the end

Mass Incarceration: Slavery Renamed

This paper aims to analyze the connections between slavery and mass incarceration. It begins by giving background information regarding the topic and setting the framework to argue that slavery was never abolished, but was instead continued using mass incarceration. The paper then goes on to further explain this concept by examining the constitutional and judicial laws in the United States, slave plantations and prisons, with regard to geographical, architectural, and operational design, and finally, the role of society in both systems. The framework for continuing slavery was set with the passing of the 13th Amendment and has since been expanded with every decision to strengthen mass incarceration

Taxonomic classification of planning decisions in health care: a review of the state of the art in OR/MS

We provide a structured overview of the typical decisions to be made in resource capacity planning and control in health care, and a review of relevant OR/MS articles for each planning decision. The contribution of this paper is twofold. First, to position the planning decisions, a taxonomy is presented. This taxonomy provides health care managers and OR/MS researchers with a method to identify, break down and classify planning and control decisions. Second, following the taxonomy, for six health care services, we provide an exhaustive specification of planning and control decisions in resource capacity planning and control. For each planning and control decision, we structurally review the key OR/MS articles and the OR/MS methods and techniques that are applied in the literature to support decision making

A survey of health care models that encompass multiple departments

In this survey we review quantitative health care models to illustrate the extent to which they encompass multiple hospital departments. The paper provides general overviews of the relationships that exists between major hospital departments and describes how these relationships are accounted for by researchers. We find the atomistic view of hospitals often taken by researchers is partially due to the ambiguity of patient care trajectories. To this end clinical pathways literature is reviewed to illustrate its potential for clarifying patient flows and for providing a holistic hospital perspective

Henry Ford vs. assembly line balancing

Ford’s Assembly Line at Highland Park is one of the most influential conceptualizations of a production system. New data reveal Ford’s operations were adaptable to strongly increasing and highly variable demand. These analyses show Ford’s assembly line was used differently than modern ones and their production systems were more flexible than previously recognized. Assembly line balancing theory largely ignores earlier practice. It will be shown that Ford used multiple lines flexibly to cope with large monthly variations in sales. Although a line may be optimized to yield lowest cost production, systems composed of several parallel lines may yield low cost production along with output and product flexibility. Recent research on multiple parallel lines has focussed on cost effectiveness without appreciating the flexibility such systems may allow. Given the current strategic importance of flexibility it should be included in such analyses as an explicit objective

Quantitative Verification: Formal Guarantees for Timeliness, Reliability and Performance

Computerised systems appear in almost all aspects of our daily lives, often in safety-critical scenarios such as embedded control systems in cars and aircraft or medical devices such as pacemakers and sensors. We are thus increasingly reliant on these systems working correctly, despite often operating in unpredictable or unreliable environments. Designers of such devices need ways to guarantee that they will operate in a reliable and efficient manner. Quantitative verification is a technique for analysing quantitative aspects of a system's design, such as timeliness, reliability or performance. It applies formal methods, based on a rigorous analysis of a mathematical model of the system, to automatically prove certain precisely specified properties, e.g. ``the airbag will always deploy within 20 milliseconds after a crash'' or ``the probability of both sensors failing simultaneously is less than 0.001''. The ability to formally guarantee quantitative properties of this kind is beneficial across a wide range of application domains. For example, in safety-critical systems, it may be essential to establish credible bounds on the probability with which certain failures or combinations of failures can occur. In embedded control systems, it is often important to comply with strict constraints on timing or resources. More generally, being able to derive guarantees on precisely specified levels of performance or efficiency is a valuable tool in the design of, for example, wireless networking protocols, robotic systems or power management algorithms, to name but a few. This report gives a short introduction to quantitative verification, focusing in particular on a widely used technique called model checking, and its generalisation to the analysis of quantitative aspects of a system such as timing, probabilistic behaviour or resource usage. The intended audience is industrial designers and developers of systems such as those highlighted above who could benefit from the application of quantitative verification,but lack expertise in formal verification or modelling